Lisa Barg, associate professor of Music History at McGill University, presents “Dancing with Billy Strayhorn” in this installment of the THEME Lecture Series.
Abstract
Choreographer/writer/director/filmmaker David Roussève’s 2018 dance piece, Halfway to Dawn, performed by his company REALITY, explores the life, music and legacy of Black queer composer, arranger, and pianist Billy Strayhorn (1915-1967). The title of the piece pays homage to an expression Billy Strayhorn coined to evoke the intimate atmosphere of his favorite time of day, those few overnight hours just before dawn. On a deeper level, however, Roussève’s work mines this expression for its metaphorical significance—for how it speaks to the personal and professional complexities of Strayhorn’s experiences as a Black queer jazz musician working in the shadows of his longtime creative partner, Duke Ellington; and for how it gestures toward a liminal temporality, opening up a space in which to imagine a dialogue between a Black queer past and present. Roussève’s concept for Halfway to Dawn, which he has described as a kind of “postmodern musical,” critically arranges biography and fiction, probing the elusive and silenced spaces and ways of knowing, being and feeling at the border of or, more precisely, in-between fact and fiction. The work unfolds over two acts which move through and freely combine an array of narrative and abstract elements: Roussève’s amalgam of modern/postmodern movement, jazz, and Black social dance; a layered sonic accompaniment consisting of Strayhorn’s recorded music and an original digital soundscape; and projected narrative text and abstract video art.
My talk discusses Roussève’s choreographic exploration of Strayhorn’s life and jazz legacy in relation to a larger danced history of Strayhorn’s music. Extending the concept of queer collaboration that I develop in my recent book Queer Arrangements: Billy Strayhorn and Midcentury Jazz Collaboration (2023), my talk considers this danced history through a focus on several recorded compositions and arrangements from 1956-1960 as (re)performed and (re)embodied in two modern ballets. The first of these, The Road to Phoebe Snow, a 1959 ballet by the African American choreographer and dancer Talley Beatty, a close friend and collaborator of Strayhorn, was premiered with Beatty’s company at the Jacob’s Pillow Festival in the summer of 1960, and subsequently became a repertoire piece for the Alvin Ailey Dance Company under the direction of Beatty over the following two decades. The second work is a filmed ballet adaptation by the French-Senegalese choreographer and dancer Maurice Béjart of the Ellington-Strayhorn Shakespearean-themed Suite, Such Sweet Thunder, produced for Belgian and German television that same year (1960). Considering these two ballets side-by-side exposes significant contrasts in theatrics, performance contexts, and representational practices and possibilities. Yet as choreo-musical jazz-dance compilations these transatlantic works embody entangled queer histories and identities, ones operated within and against the boundaries of race, gender and sexuality in both dance and jazz. Drawing on approaches from dance studies, performance studies, and feminist jazz studies, I position these danced encounters with Strayhorn’s music as both a kind of ephemeral archive of Black queer modernism, and a resource for accessing new jazz historical routes. Here, my discussion of how contemporary and midcentury choreographers and dancers have imagined bodies set to Strayhorn’s recordings builds on recent work on danced histories of jazz that advocate a turn toward the body and embodiment in studying jazz (Tucker, 2014; Wells, 2021).
Series Background
THEME, an annual colloquium of UW faculty and students of Theory, History, Ethnomusicology, and Music Education, is held on select Friday afternoons throughout the academic year. Talks are at 4 p.m in the School of Music Fishbowl unless otherwise noted. Admission is free.
Biography
Lisa Barg received her B.A. in Arts from Antioch College (1987), and her M.A. (1994) and Ph.D. (2001) in Music History from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She is currently serving as the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies. Professor Barg is the Co-editor-In-Chief of Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture.
Professor Barg’s research centers issues of gender, race, and sexuality in 20th-century music. She has published articles on race and modernist opera, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Melba Liston and Paul Robeson. She received the Kurt Weill Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in Music Theater for her article “Black Voices/White Sounds: Race and Representation in Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints and Three Acts,” and her article “Queer Encounters in the Music of Billy Strayhorn” was awarded the Philip Brett Award for exceptional musicological work in the field of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender/transsexual studies. As a member of the Melba Liston Research Collective, Professor Barg served as a guest co-editor for a special issue of the Black Music Research Journaldevoted to the career and legacy of Melba Liston.
Professor Barg’s research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC), including most recently as the principal investigator for “Collaborative Creativity: Sound Recording and Music Making.” Her forthcoming book Queer Arrangements: Billy Strayhorn and Midcentury Jazz Collaboration (Wesleyan University Press, 2023), is a new study of Strayhorn that examines his music and career at the intersection of jazz and Black queer history. Professor Barg teaches undergraduate courses in twentieth and twenty-first century music and opera, women and music, and music and dance. Her graduate seminars have examined topics in gender and jazz, feminist musicology, global musical modernisms, critical dance studies, and avant-garde performance.