Once More, With Feeling

Wesleyan University The Honors College

Livia Violet Aude Wood

Class of 2023

A thesis submitted to the

faculty of Wesleyan University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

Degree of Bachelor of Arts

with Departmental Honors in English

Middletown, Connecticut April, 2023

iii

Table of Contents

A Playlist. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .v

Prelude. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Interlude: “Pinball Wizard”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5

Interlude: “Life on Mars?” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7

Interlude: “The Weakness in Me” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Anthems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11

Interlude: “All These Things that I’ve Done” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27

Interlude: “No Surprises” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29

Hard Voice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31

Interlude: “Into the Mystic” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .45

Interlude: “Blue”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

Interlude: “Wuthering Heights” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49

Between Covers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .51

Interlude: “Angelina” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

Interlude: “Hannah Sun” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

Interlude: “Night Shift” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

Projections. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71

Postlude: “Change” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .85

Acknowledgements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87

Works Cited & References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

A Playlist

A collection of songs and artists referenced in these essays. As you read, listen along:

“Pinball Wizard,” The Who

“Life on Mars?”, David Bowie

“I’m Lucky,” Joan Armatrading

“Rosie” Joan Armatrading

“The Weakness in Me,” Joan Armatrading

“All These Things that I’ve Done,” The Killers

“No Surprises,” Radiohead

“Into the Mystic,” Van Morrison

“Blue,” Joni Mitchell

“Wuthering Heights,” Kate Bush

“Angelina,” Pinegrove

“Hannah Sun,” Lomelda

“Night Shift,” Lucy Dacus

“Change,” Big Thief

“Bridge Over Troubled Water,” Simon & Garfunkel

“Heart of Glass,” Blondie

“Ol’ 55,” Tom Waits

“Being in Love,” Wet Leg

“Baby Can I Hold You,” Tracy Chapman

“Private Dancer,” Tina Turner

“Ripples,” Genesis

“Nobody,” Mitski

“Alaska,” Maggie Rogers

“This is the Last Time,” The National

“O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” London Philharmonic Choir

“Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken,” St. Michael’s Singers

“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” Choir of King’s College

“Once in Royal David’s City,” Choir of King’s College

“Thank You,” Led Zeppelin

“Hate to See Your Heart Break,” Paramore

“Purple Rain,” Prince

“The Chain,” Fleetwood Mac

“Kaval Sviri (The Flute Plays),” Bulgarian State Television Female Choir

“OHMNI W202091,” M.I.A.

“Pilentze Pee,” Bulgarian State Television Female Choir

“Breathing,” Jason Derulo

“Moma Houbava (Beautiful Girl),” Bulgarian State Television Choir

“holy terrain,” FKA Twigs

“A, Što Ćemo,” Moira Smiley & Voco

“Speak Now,” Taylor Swift

“Dancing in the Dark,” Amy Macdonald

“Dancing in the Dark,” Bruce Springsteen

“Dancing in the Dark,” Lucy Dacus

“Dancing in the Dark,” Faye Webster

“The River,” Angie McMahon

“Catalogue d’Oiseaux: I. Le chocard des alpes,” Olivier Messiaen

“The Weather,” Pond

“I Love You So,” The Walters

“Dear to Me,” Electric Guest

“Holocene,” Bon Iver

“Home,” One Direction

Prelude

I have been a musician for as long as I can remember—as a child, I

incessantly sang invented melodies to myself, and spent afternoons plunking the

ivory keys of our stately piano. But even before music creation, I loved sound: I

drifted off to sleep to the crackling hum of an old Natalie Merchant CD, or the

sweet refrain of downstairs conversation from the tables of my parents’ dinner

parties. I found comfort in the steadiness of sound. I’ve never liked silence, never

settled easily into solitude—I’ve been seeking noise my whole life.

I trace my childhood and adolescence through music. My first piano lesson,

at age five, with a gentle man named John who taught me to pick out “Twinkle

Twinkle Little Star.” My first year in church choir, learning the rhythm of weekly

worship. The choir I joined during my year in Berlin, called Mädchenchor; nine years

old, unable to communicate through a shared language, we spoke to one another

through song. The sixth grade musical, Dear Edwina—my first solo. I had my own

number: I played a dinner-table fairy and wore a blue sateen dress adorned with

plastic forks and knives. Voice lessons at eleven, teaching myself guitar at fifteen, my

first open-mic performance in high school. The trip I took with my 11th grade

school choir to Italy, where we sang in enormous, empty Florentine churches. I’ve

grown through and with these moments. My music taste, too, has evolved as I’ve

collected songs and memories, like trinkets in a swollen cardboard shoe box—I love

Slavic folk songs just as much as One Direction hits.

Music is fundamental to my character, and yet I have a hard time writing

about it. This seems paradoxical; how could I struggle with a subject matter that feels

so easy, and so necessary, to me? Listening to Fleetwood Mac in the car or on the

way to class isn’t hard. Nor is talking to my friends about our favorite bands,

debating over The 1975’s newest album. Or jostling around in the lowlight of a

sweaty audience at a Japanese Breakfast concert. And yet writing about music is hard.

Something about trying to compress a form of expression so electric and vital

renders it nearly impossible—at least to me.

How do I put to paper what I hear? How do I convey, to a reader, how a

song sounds in my head and in my body? How do I describe, at the most basic level,

what happens in the song? I know the instruments. I can identify a guitar riff, a drum

solo, a vocal run. I recognize when a song is fast or slow, major or minor. I can

separate the verse from the chorus, from the pre-chorus, from the bridge. I can

recognize a common chord progression: C, G, Am, F. I can analyze the lyrics to my

favorite Sidney Gish song. But I’m not a musicologist, and my music theory, though

I have some training, is fairly basic; I often feel I don’t have the technical words to

describe what I’m hearing. I can’t identify adagio or a glissando. I often can’t figure

out the time signature. Chromatic, diatonic, and harmonic scales are a mystery to

me—I was never committed enough in childhood to memorize all the necessary

foundations.

But music is a language I understand intuitively. Maybe I have trouble

communicating technically what a song sounds like. But I know what it feels like. I

know when a song makes me feel sad or nostalgic or hopeful or desperate or loved.

Or when a song falls like a heavy weight in my stomach. I know when it buzzes in

my forehead and cheekbones, when it arrests me, when it moves me, when it

unsettles me. I can build a narrative around a song and its emotion. And I can write

that down, in the hopes that others know that feeling too. I can tell you how I

experienced it, how you might experience it. Music is my most precious form of

communication. Music taste is deeply intimate, and personally revealing: I sometimes

think I can understand my friends better by listening to their favorite songs than by

reading their diaries. I sometimes think music knows me better than I know myself.

In part, this project is an exercise in understanding myself better. More than that, it’s

an exercise in identifying what ties me to others, and how it ties me to them. It’s

about music as a language of communication. It’s an ode to some of my favorite

songs—the ones that have shaped and held me, that have shaped and held my loved

ones, that have shaped and held our relationships.

Interlude: “Pinball Wizard”

Five years old, our house in Somerville—the second-hand plastic toys in the

front yard, the dying dogwood, the rowdy neighbors. My dad’s favorite band, since

he was a kid, is The Who. “Pinball Wizard” explodes through his stereo system, a

jumble of clashing guitars and crashing drums.

He tells me that “Pinball Wizard” is on The Who’s concept album Tommy. It

follows the monstrous story of Tommy, a deaf, dumb, and blind kid who plays

pinball. My dad tells me, too, about the rivalry between mods and rockers, the

parents who disown their rebellious kids—the mods have their zoot suits and

mopeds, the rockers their leather and motorbikes. I understand: I have my own

rivalries with girls at my school, the ones who tell other kids not to sit with me on

the bus.

I learn, through The Who, through my dad, that music is the most important

mechanism we have—that it constructs narrative, tears apart families, forms rivalries

and unities, shapes social culture. I understand music as genealogy, as inherited and

internalized and passed on.

Interlude: “Life on Mars?”

Six or seven, my favorite song is Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” I feel mighty,

twirling around the living room to its nonsense lyrics: the girl with the mousy hair /

Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow / sailors fighting in the dance hall / Is there life on Mars? The

song’s theatrical piano, staccato and high pitched, amplifies its strange lyrics.

Enveloped in fantasy, I don’t know, yet, that songs about space are really songs

about drugs. I am earnest in my interpretation, content with sincerity.

Early high school, I discover the song again and yearn for that child-self

spinning around the house, creating her own world. I crave reversion, returning. I

long for the quiet content brought by imagination—by youthful innocence.

Interlude: “The Weakness in Me”

My mom loves Joan Armatrading. My childhood is punctuated by her music.

Seven or eight, wrapped in a blanket, I rest my head on the car window and follow

the wide moon. We drive three hours to my grandparents in Connecticut, usually at

night; my parents hope the steady engine will lull my brother and me to sleep in the

backseat. He sleeps; I suck my thumb and listen to Joan sing against the low murmur

of my parents’ voices. They whisper about things I can’t yet understand, mortgages and

cancer, dementia and nursing home or hospice? Joan speaks of things I think, then, that I

understand: I’m lucky / I’m lucky / I can walk under ladders and Oh, Rosie, don’t you do that

to the boys! / Don’t you come on so willing / don’t you come on so strong.

Years later, when I’m a singer, she suggests I sing another Joan Armatrading

song, “The Weakness in Me.” A tormented love song, the lyrics ache: But I need to see

you / and I mean to hold you / Tightly. Every time I sing it, my mom gets verklempt. As

a child, I don’t understand that Joan’s words are meaningful, that they’re like a

mantra for my mother. In the face of mortgages and cancer, dementia and nursing

homes and hospice, she chants: I’m lucky, I’m lucky, I’m lucky, I’m lucky.

Anthems

My family and I push through crowds of chattering tourists as we make our

way down a main street in the Old Town of Palermo, Sicily. I listen to the lilting

tones of conversation—Italian, French, German, passed back and forth like song.

On my left, miniature chalkboards advertise Aperol Spritz 3€, and eager waiters heckle

passersby to dine under their tattered umbrellas. On my right, elderly immigrants sit

solemnly next to their stalls, selling cheap replicas of brightly colored ceramics and

plastic kids’ toys. Above the clamor of the street, rows of terracotta apartments in

various states of disrepair: bedsheets, underwear, undershirts hung out to dry on the

small wrought-iron balconies. The cobbled street appears endless; we have been

walking for what feels like hours. The tour we’re on mostly provides us with the

opportunity to visit a plethora of churches. We walk into cathedral after cathedral

with gaudy decorations and sacral mosaics. I’m exhausted, sweaty, and ready for the

tour to end when our guide ushers us into a defunct monastery, through a narrow

hallway and into a baroque church. I catch my breath.

The cathedral is much like others we’ve seen today: high, arched ceilings,

tiled floors and hard wooden pews leading up to an extravagant altar. But between

the pews and the altar stands a group of fifteen, their ages varying, all dressed in

black. Commanded by a conductor, they sing without instrumental accompaniment,

their pure voices reverberating throughout the otherwise silent hall. I do not know

what they are singing—something religious, surely—but they sound angelic, ancient,

transcendent. The tour guide prattles away, oblivious to the scene behind her, and

my mother, brother, aunt and cousins listen to her attentively, but my father and I

are arrested by the music. We stand, rapt, and listen to their swooping and

undulating voices bounce off the beams of this historic church.

The drive back to our rental house takes an hour, through the empty,

mountainous countryside. I watch the pulsing sun begin to set, become inky and

smudged above the Tyrrhenian sea. My job is to direct my father home, and to play

music. We do not speak, but I play the songs I think he wants to hear.

Absentmindedly, we both hum along. Every so often, he asks, What about this song?

Could you play that one? And I say, I’m already ahead of you. It’s queued next. We listen to

the songs of my childhood, my adolescence, my father’s childhood and adolescence.

If I were driving, I’d play something more esoteric—some niche indie band—but

there’s something to be said for embracing nostalgia: in the echoes of these songs I

hear my youth and imagine my father’s. The car is something like church—driving as

ritual, the songs held in closed space, bouncing from wall to wall. I wonder if he is

thinking of the choir in that church, replaying their voices in his head, reckoning

with the sheer gravity of the music. I am.

✽ ✽ ✽

My brother and I used to listen to classical music every night as we fell

asleep. When I was little we shared a bedroom with high ceilings. We had a small

enclosed backyard and a front yard that opened onto the street where my mother

tried a number of times to plant dogwood trees—they died every time. Our backyard

was dwarfed by a groaning terracotta-colored apartment building which housed

enormous families who spilled out onto their small wooden balconies. I remember

only brief images of the bedroom: the wall-to-wall carpeting, the rickety bookshelf

full of faded, love-worn children’s books (Elsie Piddock Skips in Her Sleep, The Little

Prince, Brave Irene—books with intricate water-color illustrations) and our twin beds,

painted green with a white symbol adorning each headboard. Mine was a star and my

brother’s was a moon. In the corner of the room sat a gray plastic CD player. Each

night one of my parents would lie on the floor in the space between our two beds

and read us a story. My father would place a CD in the tinny speaker—Bach,

Beethoven, Chopin—and he’d hum along as he kissed us goodnight. I’d hear him

the next day pressing the ivory keys of our old, out-of-tune piano, trying to play a

piece from the night before, slowing, faltering. He’d play the same phrase over and

over like a scratched record skipping.

A few years later, my parents bought their first iPod. It was fat and

rectangular, and they downloaded their entire discography onto it: The Who, Kate

Bush, Simon and Garfunkel, Van Morrison, Blondie. That collection, those songs,

shaped the course of my childhood. I danced around in the living room with earbuds

plugged in, eyes closed, sweaty and flailing; I imagined myself to be twenty and in a

nightclub, my long hair falling gracefully down my back, my lips painted red. I curled

against the window in the back seat of our car as my parents hit shuffle and hummed

along, my father perfectly in tune and my mother perfectly out of it. I lay awake in

my own room in another city, years later, as these songs echoed from a different

speaker still in the corner, trying desperately to will myself to sleep.

My father has shared his life with me through music. He taught me

everything I know about the subject. He encouraged me to take piano lessons, and

sat with me as I resisted practice. I joined the church choir because he had sung in

his. I took voice lessons at his behest, listened to his song suggestions in the car on

the way to school (Tom Waits, Radiohead, Bruce Springsteen), and auditioned for

that year’s musical. He encouraged me to perform at my school’s open mic night

even when I was anxious. He came to all my recitals and told me I had done well

when I hadn’t, when I’d frozen and stumbled over my notes and turned red. Even

now, he spends hours scrolling through YouTube for the best live performance of a

song and when he finds it, he beckons to me and places his headphones over my

ears, eager for my approval. When I’m at college, he texts me: Do you know Wet Leg’s

debut album. I just heard it reviewed on npr and it sounds fun and indie and quite up your street.

Xo. When I’m home, he asks me shyly to accompany him and we crowd around our

same old piano while my fingers fumble on the neck of the bass I don’t really know

how to play; we practice Tracy Chapman, Tina Turner, Phil Collins.

In eighth grade I started making CD playlists for my father for Christmas. I

spent hours hunched on the floor of my bedroom, painstakingly curating a list of

songs, downloading them, burning the disc, and collaging a CD case with a

typewriter-printed track list on the back. I tried to include a combination of songs I

knew he would like and songs I hoped he would like. In the car, he’d play the CD,

mulling over each track. I’d monitor his reaction closely, waiting for a small nod, a

half-smile, a settled satisfaction in his eyes. Over time, I’ve noticed he prefers songs

with good drums, but skips over the songs that I think have the best lyrics. Mostly I

just want to prove that my own music taste is as good as his, and mostly the gesture

is more meaningful than the songs themselves, though he’s had a few unexpected

favorites—Mitski, Maggie Rogers, The National. He tells me he thinks they’re

brilliant.

Music holds my every form. Feelings I’ve never been able to describe have

been perfectly encapsulated in songs by strangers that I found on the internet, lyrics

haunting, a guitar solo exploding the pit in my stomach. Music is the closest thing to

intimacy that my father and I have, the closest thing to a collective history, to

consistency, to communication. Through music I tell my dad so many things—thank

you, I love you, I miss you, I’m sorry. I play a song for him in the car that says I’m sad today,

or I’ve been sad for a while, or sorry I yelled at you, or isn’t it beautiful? I think when he

places his headphones over my ears and turns up the volume, he’s trying to tell me

something too.

My mother’s relationship to music is different. She loves music deeply—I

can picture her nodding her head along to Pulp’s “Common People” (one of her

favorite songs), or tearing up as she plays “Beneath Your Beautiful” by Emili Sandé

and Labrinth to cheer herself up. But words are instinctual for her, not music. She

and I fill the silence in other ways. My mother’s voice is like song. She spins stories

out like spider’s thread: at the kitchen table for hours, afternoon sun filtering in,

shifting; folding laundry on her bed in neat piles, all my brother’s soccer jerseys and

my mismatched socks; walking around the block admiring our neighbor’s gardens,

our dogs pulling eagerly at their leashes. She tells me about her childhood, her

colleagues, her writing, her friend with cancer. I tell her about my work, my friends,

my passing thoughts. Sometimes we argue, clawing at one another with our words. I

cook her dinner; she washes my dishes. We sit on the couch and predict each plot

twist in our favorite British crime television shows, my head nestled in her lap. She

smooths my hair away from my face when I cry. It’s not music, but we have our own

private language.

✽ ✽ ✽

My father grew up in Durham, a working-class university town in Northern

England. His father was a zoology professor, his mother a school teacher (although

she also picked up shifts at the post office or sold paintings off the walls in their

house when they were short of money). He was a middle child, between an

academically gifted older brother and a complicated younger sister. They were all

raised devoutly Christian, loyal members of the Church of England.

My grandparents’ lives—and by extension, my father’s—were ruled by

religion, by the dynamics of sin and the desperate need to be absolved of it. My

grandparents didn’t listen to rock music; they didn’t swear. They disapproved of any

activity considered blasphemous—smoking, drinking, partying. They went to church

at least twice a week, closely and warily monitored my father and his brother’s

relationships to girls and sex, and read the Bible to themselves every night before

bed. They exemplified moral purity; they embodied discipline.

My father’s family did not have a lot of money, but they prioritized two

things: education and music. When my father was very young, only eight or nine,

they sent his brother and him away to a boarding school in town—a chorister

school. There, my dad and a group of other young boys with prepubescent treble

voices sang in the cathedral choir. Every Christmas, my father plays an old record of

his choir’s Christmas service. He sounds angelic.

In some ways, my father—to a lesser degree than my grandparents—

replicated the same strict boundaries in which he had been raised. He pushed musical

education upon me, perhaps without quite realizing it. He was deeply concerned with

the state of my musical enlightenment, and urged me to carry on with it even as I

pleaded to stop: I recall my last piano recital, in ninth grade, for which I had been

too busy to practice all semester. I had just started at a new school and was

overwhelmed with academics, new friends, and acting in the freshman school play,

Our Town. I had begged him to let me stop taking lessons, or at least not perform in

the recital, but he was adamant. Inevitably, I choked, fumbling on the keys and

playing dissonant, painful chords. I was mortified. I suppose this was his way of

teaching me a lesson about discipline, commitment, and the ritual of practice—all

tenets of the religion he so staunchly spurned.

When I was eight, my parents encouraged me to join our local church choir.

The church was Anglican, like my grandparents’, but with a Massachusetts-liberal

inclination that my father could only have dreamed of in his youth. I joined with my

best friend, Lettie. We were both self-proclaimed singers with British parents whose

first instincts were to stick us in a church choir, and we were eager to show off our

skills. We rehearsed every Wednesday night in the fluorescently lit basement room of

the community center at Christ Church Cambridge, our feet dragging across the

squeaky linoleum floor. The first fifteen minutes were dedicated to music theory. We

were supposed to sit placidly in front of our music stands and fill in music notes on a

staff with a pencil. Most of the time, the choristers spent those first fifteen minutes

yelling at one another from across the room, raising our hands in frustration at the

pages in front of us, or otherwise goofing off. I suppose my church choir didn’t

possess quite the discipline of my father’s.

The rest of rehearsal was dedicated to learning the hymns and anthems that

we’d sing on Sunday—the hymns, more formulaic in structure, were sung by the

whole church, while the more freely versed anthems were sung only by the choir.

The twelve or so of us would gather around the scratched piano, and Stuart, the

organist and choir-master, would accompany us as we hesitantly parsed the faded

sheet music in the binders in front of us. Sometimes the songs were in Latin or

German; even if they were in English the pronunciation was confusing, the emphasis

on the wrong syllable. But with each practice we grew more confident. Often Stuart

would ask for a volunteer to try to sight-read the next line of music and our hands

would shoot up, desperate to show off, though more often than not, we were wrong.

On Sundays, my parents dropped me off—they rarely stayed for the service.

In the basement, I would dress in my cassock—a long red robe with a ribbon of

buttons down the middle—and my surplice, a billowing pleated white blouse worn

over the cassock. I looked like a strange, medieval being. The tags on the back of the

cassock and surplice had the faded initials of past members, people I’d never met

and never would; yet these past choristers and I shared an almost sacred experience.

Before the service, we’d line up on the lawn in front of the wide church doors, the

youth choir in front of the adult choir, led by acolytes in creamy white robes carrying

candles on engraved silver poles. As the organ music began, we processed slowly up

the aisle towards the altar, past pews of the congregation, towards the choir’s

benches. I was always acutely aware of being watched as we walked in, not by God

but by the parishioners; I was a performer, the service my stage.

The service itself felt like a monotonous cycle of standing and sitting,

listening and repeating, singing and talking. The youth choir slouched in the hard

wooden pews and doodled on our church bulletins with golf pencils, passing notes

back and forth. Lettie and I scribbled endless messages to each other about the boy

in our choir we both liked. At the organ’s first note we rose in unison, our binders

spread in front of us like road maps. We sang after readings of the Lessons; we sang

during Communion. We sang “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” and “Glorious

Things of Thee Are Spoken,” our voices filling the room, surging with the organ. At

Christmas, we prepared for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols: We sang “O

Come O Come Emmanuel” and “Once in Royal David’s City” between readings

from the Books of Luke and Matthew on Christ’s nativity. At Easter, we sang in

both the early and mid-morning services; between the two, we ate dry scrambled

eggs in a back room of the church, careful not to spill on our robes. At the end of

each service every week, the choir processed out with a sense of urgency, marching

to the tune of Stuart’s mighty organ.

I ignored the biblical teachings as nervous Christians approached the podium

to read the Lessons, or as the vicar gave a sermon on righteousness. Let Christ into

your heart. Our songs were worship:

Glorious things of thee are spoken,

Zion, city of our God;

He whose word cannot be broken formed thee for his own abode.

On the Rock of Ages founded,

what can shake thy sure repose?

With salvation's walls surrounded,

Thou may smile at all thy foes.

I felt different from the rest of the churchgoers: I was not there to learn

about God but instead to sing, to create the experience that allowed others to learn

about God. My investment was not in Him but in the beauty of the music.

Nevertheless, I was enmeshed in the rhythm of it all—procession, communion, The

Peace. We were a community. Wherever you are in your journey with God, or towards God,

you are welcome here.

✽ ✽ ✽

My father began playing both trumpet and piano soon after he joined

chorister school. The trumpet has carried him through the rest of his life: his skill

with the instrument landed him a partial music scholarship at Eton College. When he

was sixteen, his orchestra went on a musical tour of America, and he visited New

York for the first time. Much older, he moved to America, and when he returned to

his parents’ town, he would play the trumpet at their church services. He played the

trumpet at both of his parents’ funerals, too.

Although he plays trumpet and piano, he’s always been a percussionist at

heart. At chorister school, he was continually reprimanded for drumming with his

fingers on the desk—sometimes with a sharp remark, sometimes physically, with a

ruler and “six of the best.” It never stopped him, though. An energy almost seemed

to possess him, completely out of his control, and he was subject to its expression.

The drums are not an obviously Evangelical Christian instrument: their presence in

rock music, for my grandparents, was dangerously close to the sacrilegious. The

instrument epitomized noisy non-conformity: at chorister school, where religious

obedience was everything, my father rebelled. He was mischievous, unable to follow

instruction. My dad has always been quietly stubborn; I think he liked to undermine

both his school’s and his parents’ authority. His desire to rebel was more than just a

sly, boyish rejection of school rules: he often tells me he felt constricted by the

pervasive religious doctrine of purity that was impressed upon him by his parents, his

school, his church music. Caught between the desire to please his parents and the

desire to be uncontrollable, he sought joy and release in the few places he could find

it.

Throughout his life, my father’s relationship with religion has been

contentious: he hates it—the piety, the judgment and control, the brainwashing—

and yet he’s never been able to let it go. I didn’t know that when I was eight, though.

I just knew that we went to church occasionally at home and always when visiting

my paternal grandparents. Visits to those grandparents inevitably involved a

performance. Until their death, my father presented an image to his parents of

Christian obedience; as far as they knew, we went to church every Sunday. Always

the favorite child, he couldn’t bear to tell them the truth: that he had rejected

religion, that he lived a life they would consider blasphemous and profane—and that

he was filled with an impish, childlike joy at that very sacrilege.

In preparation for our visits to the Scottish village where my grandparents

lived, I had to scrub the nail polish off of my nails and neatly fold my best, most

modest dresses into my suitcase—I did not wear pants, because that was unladylike.

At dinner, we solemnly said grace before beginning our meal; often, my brother and I

forgot this particular pretense and began ravenously shoveling bites of my

grandfather’s Shepherd's pie into our mouths. I secretly liked going to church when

we visited. On Sunday mornings, I would put on one of my dresses and my

grandmother would settle me on the floor of the dusty sun porch and smooth my

hair down with a heavy, hard-bristled brush. Halfway through the service I’d be

collected with the other young children for a Sunday school lesson, skipping the

boring parts—the readings of the Lessons, the Sermon, the Communion offering.

After the service was over, the congregation would attend a reception in the church

center, and I’d pile a paper plate high with buttery shortbread biscuits from a tin and

sip from a milky paper cup of tea. I felt safe there, enveloped in the steady, eternal

rhythm of the church: the same parishioners, the same prayers, the same anthems,

the same procession, every week without fail. Forever and ever, amen.

Growing up, both of my father’s siblings were forced to choose between

religion and freedom. My uncle, Angus, loved rock music as a teenager, and learned

to play the bass. At eighteen—technically an adult—he asked his parents for

permission to go to a Led Zeppelin concert in Knebworth Park, near London. While

they didn’t forbid him from going, my grandparents made it clear that his decision to

attend would represent a tremendous moral failure. Nothing was more profane than

Led Zeppelin, a heavy-metal band involved with drugs, violence, and sex. If Angus

went, they believed, he would return a changed man, a worse man: he might lose his

soul. And so he chose religion, and remained in the comfortable approval of his

parents and his God.

My father’s sister, Anna, grew up like her siblings, singing and playing piano

and organ, while following the religious dictates of her family and community. In

fact, it was in a church choir that she first met her wife. This complication—the fact

of my aunt’s queerness—plagued my grandmother, haunted her for the rest of her

life. My grandmother’s whole world revolved around the church—what would the

parishioners, the townspeople, say? Would they gossip behind my grandmother’s

back? Would they excommunicate her? Would Anna’s romantic and sexual impurity

seep into her slowly but surely, like some insidious moral poison? My grandmother

was never able to overcome this contempt for my aunt’s sexuality, never able to

embrace her daughter as she embraced God.

Anna, like my father, still feels trapped: no matter how anti-religious she is,

she can’t entirely let the Church go. She lives in Belgium now, with her wife and two

children. We do not see her often—although my father was kinder to her than my

grandmother, the deep-rooted, religiously-oriented trauma of her treatment by her

mother has been too painful for her to fully surmount. She distanced herself and her

family—both physically and emotionally—from the judgment of her parents and her

upbringing.

She still plays the church organ and she teaches lessons to children. The

trained musician in her, as in my father, clings to this powerful, prophetic church

music. I think of my grandmother, and my aunt, and of my own queerness;

sometimes my father absentmindedly calls me Anna, or Annie, his nickname for her.

Am I following in Anna’s footsteps, inheriting her burdens? Is her religious trauma

hereditary? In what ways does my experience mimic my aunt’s; in what ways does it

differ? I, like Anna, am inextricably enmeshed in the music; I, too, am affected by the

Church’s judgment and morality and complicated devotion.

✽ ✽ ✽

I am often taken aback by how deeply my father’s understanding of music is

informed by his background in church music. Sometimes, I find myself singing while

chopping onions in the kitchen, and my father absentmindedly hums the baritone

voice part along with me, intuiting the notes because of his understanding of music

theory. He doesn’t even need to know the song I’m singing. Christian church music,

I have come to understand, has shaped much of the Western musical canon: the

chord progressions, the familiar cadences, the dissonance and resolution, even the

descants, are the foundations for most contemporary music. Rock and pop are

deeply anthemic; they proceed through verses and choruses as hymns do, their

rhythms and harmonies swell just as church music does, climaxing at the refrain—

take, for instance, The Who, my father’s favorite band. Like hymns, The Who’s

songs build with each verse, grow stronger with the addition of a new guitar riff or

vocal part, head steadily towards apotheosis. They evoke the same feeling of

deference, of worship, of release.

Although I attended many church services during my stint in the choir, I

always made a point not to repeat prayers with everyone else, or say “Amen” when I

was supposed to. It was my own little secret, mouthing the words on the page

without saying them out loud. I think I learned this from my father, who, when

forced to attend church, always looked slightly amused by the sincerity of the

prayers. Taking his cue, I found Christianity highly suspect. And yet I loved my

church. I desperately looked forward to every rehearsal. I found the music so moving

that sometimes during the service I felt like I was going to cry. Not only did church

open up a world of music for me—one that I consider fundamental to my entire

understanding of the subject—but it grounded me in community and mutual care.

Both the music and the people gave me a keen sense of belonging, however much I

rejected the concept of religion itself.

Every year I beg my family to go to Christmas and Easter church services

with me. I put on my modest dress and tights, and we file into the sparsely populated

pews for Christmas Eve Midnight Mass and on Easter morning. We sing the same

hymns I sang as a child. We say the same prayers; I say them out loud, now. I see the

same aging faces giving communion and collecting money; I see the members of my

choir grown up. I wonder if the congregation knows that we’re father and daughter.

Do he and I sing the same? Are our voices harmonious? Complementary?

Dissonant? Does our shared love of this enormous and unwieldy thing, this

otherworldly music, connect us visibly and audibly to others? Or does it thread us

together only internally, viscerally?

✽ ✽ ✽

Every summer, my dad plays the drums in the Dog House Band, a group of

middle-aged men who gather to perform a show at Bennington College’s MFA

program reception. When I was sixteen, my father invited me to sing with them. One

weekend in June every year, we fill the car with bags of cymbals, drumsticks, and

drum heads, and drive north to Vermont, up the winding road over Hogback

Mountain. We stop at the Vermont Country Store for drip coffee and cheese-and-

vegetable sandwiches. The campus glows green in the summer, swathes of grass

stretching infinitely into the surrounding hills. Little white houses dot a path that

leads to an outlook with a bench. I sit in the shade and watch wildflowers dance in

the breeze.

That night, we perform for a bunch of 30-somethings drinking craft beers

under string lights; we sing Paramore, Prince, Fleetwood Mac. It is unbelievably

nerdy, but I love it. My mother and brother are in the audience, filming each song. I

stand at the microphone, my dad thumping the bass drum behind me, and I feel

electric. The music is anthemic; it soars, it grinds, it awakens. It has its own

heartbeat. I think back to the choir in the church in Sicily, to the car ride home,

saturated in the music of the past. I realize: Music is like Church, for my father and

me. It’s something like devotion; submitting to it feels like absolution.

Interlude: “All These Things that I’ve Done”

Berlin is bitterly cold, and the sun sets early. The city seems to sprawl

endlessly, its wide, empty streets cleaved by cold concrete—post-war buildings,

concealing the shadows of bombed ruins. The landscape incites alienation, isolation.

In the winter, before dawn, my father drives my brother, our neighbor, and

me thirty minutes to our bilingual international school, J.F.K. Schule, in the suburbs.

We pass through the Grunewald, a shadowy forest with impossibly tall trees. The

Grunewald is like a fairytale forest: Hansel and Gretel or Little Red Riding Hood.

Through the car windows, our eyes search for wild boar.

The song of our winter is “All These Things that I’ve Done” by The Killers.

It’s a speeding song, a freedom song; the drums thump persistently, driving the

singer forward. I come to know music as momentary escape—floating above the

unease that hangs around the city, the forest, and us like thick fog. We play it over

and over.

Interlude: “No Surprises”

7:55 am, back in Cambridge in the car on the way to school. Fifth grade is

tumultuous—socially unsteady, I’m racked with constant anxiety about who I’ll talk

to, whether I’ll be welcomed into the group or stand awkwardly outside it. We’re

running late (we always are). I argue with my father about picking the music: I

measure my time in songs, and I know it only takes one song to get to school.

I lose. He plays Radiohead’s “No Surprises.” The opening notes ring like a

siren through my cloudy head. A heart that’s full up like a landfill / A job that slowly kills

you. I haven’t understood, until now, that a song can embody an intangible emotion,

that it can press at the tender bruise of my vulnerability. I’ll take a quiet life. I haven’t

yet encountered a song that encapsulates my indescribable melancholy. I’m

beginning to understand precariousness, solitude.

Hard Voice

Gaga: Five Foot Two begins with Lady Gaga suspended in the air, preparing for

a grand entrance to the 2017 Super Bowl halftime show. From below, we see her

sparkling stiletto boots and matching bejeweled unitard as she begins to ascend, a

wire pulley raising her up like some ethereal winged being, growing smaller and

smaller against the gray sky. The entire dramatic sequence is set to the discordant

voices of the Bulgarian State Television Female Choir singing “Kaval Sviri.” The

voices swarm in and out of dissonance and harmony like a hive of buzzing bees; the

verses, building forcefully, create an anxious and unrelenting auditory experience.

Lady Gaga fades into the background of the title credits as the low voices of the

song imitate some sort of heart beat-like drum—doobaDOObada doobaDOObada—and

the high voices warble ti ti on a minor interval. The song cuts out before the musical

dissonance can resolve, each tense voice blossoming like an early spring flower. The

effect is disquieting, and perhaps a little confusing: a documentary about one of the

greatest pop stars of my youth begins with the droning notes of an Eastern

European folk song.

I watched the opening of this documentary with bewildered awe. Gaga is a

prolific musician with a huge body of work—why doesn’t the movie begin with one

of her hit songs? Why not open with “Bad Romance” or “Alejandro”—both of

which emblemize not only her career but the entire musical culture of the early

2010s? Why pick a song from a 1988 Bulgarian album? But Lady Gaga is not the

only Western pop artist to use this song: M.I.A. sampled “Kaval Sviri” in her song

“OHMNI W202091.” Other popular artists have sampled Eastern European folk

music—Jason Derulo uses the opening refrain of the Bulgarian State Television

Female Choir’s “Pilentze Pee” in his song “Breathing,” and FKA Twigs samples a

tune called “Moma Houbava” from the same group in her song “holy terrain.” I was

also surprised when a student production of Richard III at Yale last spring had the

actors march on stage to the opening notes of “Kaval.” I wonder: what is it about

the melodies and harmonies of Eastern European folk music, about the songs’

structure or the sonic landscape, that seizes so many people? How does a genre of

music so firmly rooted in regional tradition become so malleable, so permutative, as

to be sampled across the spectrum of contemporary music?

✽ ✽ ✽

I first encountered “Kaval Sviri” in the winter of 2021. I had just joined

Slavei, Wesleyan’s Eastern European and Balkan singing group. I’d seen the group

perform once at an a cappella showcase a few years prior, and I’d observed two

things: first, it was bizarre that an entire organization dedicated to Eastern European

music existed, even at a liberal arts school like Wesleyan. Second, Slavei was by far

the best group that performed that day.

I auditioned on a whim, desperate for an activity that got me out of my room

and in the company of other people (it was the height of COVID, and I, like

everyone else, was lonely and bored). But I was also intrigued by the music, which I

could still remember two years later: it was eerie, resonant, and far out of my

comfort zone. I’d grown up singing pop music—accompanying myself on the

piano—as well as participating in the church choir, and I’d dabbled in a cappella.

Slavei was unlike anything I’d ever heard before.

The auditions took place outside on a brisk day in March. I sat in a circle of

unfamiliar faces and split strands of damp grass with my fingers. We had gathered in

a secluded enclosure, walled in on three sides by thick concrete blocks. We began by

learning the first two lines of a duet, a simple, repetitive Croatian song called

“Predite.” Then the members of Slavei explained “hard voice.” Hard voice, they said,

is a particular kind of Eastern European singing technique that removes all the

traditional air, or breathiness—often associated with Western pop music—from the

voice. One member described it as sending a beam of light out from one’s core and

across the space. Sharp, nasal, often grating, hard voice isn’t always appealing to the

ear. The harmonies of Slavic music more broadly are dissonant, their parts

competing and clashing, the singers’ vocal friction failing to resolve. But it is

musically pure: president of the Center for World Music and ethnomusicologist

Timothy Rice, speaking to Bulgarian singers, found that the goal of their nasal tone is

“to make the harmony ‘ring like a bell.’” The voices, though often clashing, are

always on the note. And discord is exactly what makes the music beautiful. It defies

the standard conventions of Western music: the predictable chord progression, the

inevitable tonal resolution, the repetitive beat and simple major-third harmony. To

the untrained Western ear, Eastern European music remains unaccountable—

definable only by what it is not.

Slavei meets once a week for two hours. We sing Slavic folk songs—

Bulgarian, Croatian, Romanian, Macedonian, Georgian, Bosnian, and more—in

languages that most of us do not speak, and with translations we cannot fully

understand. Occasionally, the songs are religious. Mostly, though, the songs are

about mundanity: the lives of Slavic peasants as they sow peppers in the earth, marry

off their children, fetch water in brightly colored jugs. That first spring, those

rehearsals were the highlight of my week. We sat in lawn chairs in the backyard of

someone’s house and the seniors taught us songs that they’d learned by ear, that had

been taught to them by others who’d learned by ear; these songs dated back

centuries, and were probably originally composed and taught by ear, too. We sang

softly, almost whispering, and loudly, our voices full and sharp, blades of noise

shooting out at each other. We squinted against the early-setting sun and tried to

read the transliteration of Slavic lyrics that had been printed, laminated, and encased

in a binder—the only documents of our music that we had, the only proof of our

group’s existence passed down year after year. In the bruising dusk of early spring,

my toes froze in my socks and boots; we did jumping jacks to ward off the frost.

We split into sections to learn “Kaval Sviri,” parsing through a screenshot of

sheet music for the song, which somebody had found from a previous year. The

song’s lyrics are simple: a child tells their mother about hearing a flute, or a kaval,

playing scales: A kaval is playing, mother / up, down, mother, up, down, mother / A kaval is

playing mother / up, down, mother, near the village.

But the final lines are strangely poignant:

Ya shte ida, mamo, da go vida I will go, mother, to see it

da go vida, da go vida, mamo da go chuya to see it, mother, to hear it

Ako mi e nashencheto If it's someone from our village

shte go lyuba den do pladne I'll love him from dawn till dusk

Ako mi e yabandjiche If it's a stranger

shte go lyuba dor do jivot I'll love him all my life.

At times, the language barrier of these songs can feel frustrating; the lyrics

seem to hold no tangible significance to us. But the music is more emotive than the

lyrics could ever be. The lyrics speak through the melody—the swarming, jittery

force of voices mimics a flute scale, the dissonance resolving into satisfying major

harmonies as the lyrics sing of love. Without words, the music holds a rawness; it

becomes a visceral, rather than intellectual, form of communication. We don’t need a

translation to understand “Kaval Sviri.”

In Slavei, I pushed my voice in strange and unusual ways; I learned hard voice

and taught myself to hold my own note as others dipped and surged around me. I

beat irregular rhythms into the ground with the heel of my foot as I sang. I walked

home in the dark, humming the evasive, spectral melodies I was coming to know. I

loved the songs. I felt more grounded than I had in months. In a period of so much

chaos, loneliness, and anxiety, Slavei was consistent; it became routine. But more

than that, it allowed the members of Slavei to practice a kind of fantastical escapism:

the music transported us away from the present moment and all its uncertainty. All

of us, each from different corners of Wesleyan, came to form a community as best

we could during the pandemic; the music was a hopeful reminder of what felt like a

less precarious, more stable world. Singing these songs, we were no longer isolated;

Eastern European music offered a brief but deeply significant glimpse into (then-

rare) unity. The songs embodied harmony itself.

Joining Slavei, I began to walk a strange tightrope with no real end in sight;

my involvement quickly became so much more than just a desire to sing. I am now

deeply enmeshed in the fabric of the music, and indeed in its culture and history. But

what does it mean to form such a personal attachment to a foreign culture to which I

don’t belong? The relationship is one-sided, almost parasitic. Slavei, for all its love of,

and appreciation for, Eastern European music, can never truly do it justice—our hard

voice is inaccurate, our pronunciations misinformed, our harmonies distorted and

simplified. This is not our language; these are not our experiences. What license do

we have for interpretation? What license do M.I.A., Jason Derulo, and FKA Twigs

have to take that music and make it their own?

In some ways, the music was distorted when Filip Kutev, a Bulgarian

composer, formed the Bulgarian State Ensemble for Folk Song and Dance in the

1950s; this ensemble, along with the Bulgarian State Television Female choir (known

for its contribution to the Grammy-winning album Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares),

popularized Bulgarian music in the West. Their music, though beautiful, is diluted;

it’s not true Eastern European folk music, but instead something called obrabotki,

contemporary Bulgarian music influenced by Western musical practices such as

harmony and rhythm (obrabotka literally translates to “arranging, modeling, or

editing”). Much of the music we sing in Slavei is obrabotki: songs rooted in traditional

folk customs, but harmonically restructured to appeal to the Western ear. Thus, our

music is something of a hybrid. Its sense of legitimacy, like ours, is shaped by both

Slavic and Western forces—it becomes muddled, slippery.

✽ ✽ ✽

My aunt Elizabeth—my mother’s sister—began studying Russian in Toronto

in the late 1970s, when she attended elementary school there. She had no connection

to the language—her mother was Canadian, her father French, and before Toronto,

they’d all lived in Australia—but something drew her to it nonetheless. Years later,

Elizabeth returned to the University of Toronto as an undergraduate, where she

studied Russian. Invited by a Russian classmate, Elizabeth joined Christ the Saviour

Cathedral, a Russian Orthodox church, where she sang in the choir. Most of the

other members of the choir were older and of Eastern European or Slavic

extraction—Russian, Ukrainian, Polish—expatriates of the Soviet Union who had

emigrated to Canada. The music they sang was primarily in Old Church Slavonic or

Cyrillic, the linguistic precursors to all Slavic languages.

They rehearsed every week, sang at all the services, and prepared for special

festivals such as Christmas and Easter. In many ways, the rhythm of the group—

weekly rehearsals and services, singing from tattered reprints of sheet music, the

dimly lit rehearsal space—was completely ordinary, indistinguishable from most

churches in many parts of North America, my own included. But what made this

particular church special—and rare—was the music. I find religious music, like

Bach’s St Matthew Passion, moving to begin with. But Eastern European music feels

completely unlike Western composition, and therein lies the Russian Orthodox

Church’s power: the two genres combined—simultaneously sacred and folk—

become a monumental force. I can only imagine how dynamic and persuasive the

choir might sound. The music, Elizabeth tells me, was beautiful, the harmonies very

unusual and very powerful. I imagine my aunt, young, standing in the pews of a gilded

church, her voice intertwining with those of so many strangers. Something in the

music reassembled all those people together, thousands of miles away from their

homes. I almost hear the coils of unusual, haunting harmonies snaking up to the high

arches of the altar, dispersing like smoke. There are no recordings online of her choir

in the 1980s; the only proof of her time there exists on faded tapes buried

somewhere in her storage. But I find videos of the Church—still very much in

existence—and its weekly services. The voices in the recordings drone in and out of

harmony with the organ; the music sounds heavy and primordial, like a Gregorian

chant.

Elizabeth is Christian in a passive way, like many in our fairly secular

society—church at Christmas and Easter, but not much else. And yet, when asked

about her religious connection to the Russian Orthodox Church, she tells me:

It wasn’t a religious experience but my belief was also linked very much to these

hymns and to singing them. You know yourself, if you’re singing on an Easter Sunday or a

Christmas and you’re singing a descant or you’re singing the final hymn, that’s a super powerful

moment, right? It feels like a real moment of rejoicing. Through the music.

More than God, what Elizabeth believed in was the music. This kind of

music became for her, like it has become for me, something to believe in, to devote

ourselves to and to remain faithfully involved with. We can pray to it and rejoice

with it, mourn and grow and love with it, and it serves us better than God ever

could. The years that Elizabeth spent in Toronto as an undergraduate could easily

have been destabilizing and dissociative; she had moved around a lot as a child, and

although she’d spent a few years there in her early adolescence, Toronto was not

quite home. Joining the Russian Orthodox Choir, she created a space for herself. She,

like all of the other members of the choir, was displaced, transplanted, nation-less;

and yet the music became their community. They did not merely rely on an already

existing culture—that of Eastern Europe—to ground themselves. Rather, the choir

created their own culture: a hybrid of urban Canadian life and preserved Soviet

traditions.

That culture, and Elizabeth’s love of it, has endured through her entire life:

she pursued a masters in Russian Literature, and after becoming a lawyer, moved to a

remote Russian village working for the International Finance Corporation, where she

met her husband (a Russian) and had two children. Even now, on vacation with her

family and mine, she’ll scold her children, or whisper with her husband about the

restaurant bill, in Russian; their language is private and separate from our collective

communication. When I ask her about this perhaps unexpected cultural affinity,

about what it means to her, she tells me she thinks that her introduction to the

Russian Orthodox Church is what solidified it. Her love of Russia and its culture

expanded beyond an affinity and into the realm of personal, lived experience. She

says, it is very deep. It is very deep. I say, it’s been a lifetime thing. She says, exactly.

Anna, my father’s sister, studied music as an undergraduate at Glasgow

University in Scotland, and then began an ethnomusicology Ph.D. at Newcastle

University. For a number of reasons, including an untreated chronic illness, she

never completed the Ph.D., but she began studying and attempting to transcribe

“untranscribable” Romanian folk music—music that seems too aurally complex,

that’s sung differently every time, that does not fit within the bounds of Western

notation. She embarked by listening to the field recordings of Eastern European

composers and ethnomusicologists such as Béla Bartók and Constantin Brăiloiu,

who had collected vocal recordings of Romanians and other Slavs in the 1930s. She

traveled to Romania, where she stayed with families in villages nestled under the

mountains, whose houses had no indoor restrooms, no running water; once a week,

she bathed in scalding water heated on the stove. There, she experienced the musical

traditions of the country first hand. She tells me about a funeral she attended: a long

procession carrying black flags (she called the procession creepy), songs that sounded

like wailing expressions of grief, which went on for hours. The songs, she says, were

very formulaic; because they went on for so long, they were repetitive, and verses

could be added spontaneously without much thought. This is the tradition of ballads,

she tells me. Albert Lord and Milman Parry, two academics who studied the

Homeric epic and its relationship to Slavic oral tradition, found that the Bulgarian

oral tradition of story-telling through song mimicked the Homeric epic, particularly

in its repetitive grammatical and musical structure, which allowed verses to be added

and the story to be continued, sometimes for hours. Through these funeral songs,

Eastern European villagers spin great epics.

Anna tells me as well about preparing for Greek Orthodox Easter, the men

standing on one side of the room and the women on the other, folk dancing

competitions in traditional costumes, hours upon hours of singing. The singing, she

says, was not refined choir-girl, choir-boy stuff—it was a different type of singing, really out of the

chest. I suspect that she is referring to hard voice, although I imagine it has a different

name and a different significance there.

I ask Anna what, specifically, drew her to this particular field. She tells me

that this type of Romanian folk song, voice without any accompaniment, is song in its

purest form. It’s simple. There’s rarely instrumental accompaniment; the voices are

strong and always on the note. Anna explains that listening to the voice ululate,

shuddering up and down a tonal scale that does not exist in the West, one can hear

the entire history of the East: the culture and traditions of the Ottoman Empire, of

the Teutons and the Orient, of mass migration and persecution, of exodus and grief

and solidarity.

When I joined Slavei, I had no idea that my family already had a history with

this wild genre of music. When my mother told me that both my aunts, on both

sides of my family, on opposite sides of an immense ocean, had found a passion for

the same subject, I almost didn’t believe her. Despite the fact that neither lineage can

claim any Eastern European blood, Anna, Elizabeth, and I found the same music—I

almost feel like the music found us. My family’s interest in Eastern European music

is transnational, border-defying; together, we create a far-reaching map, a web of

cultures and identities with a singular interest. What is it that drew all three of us—

completely independently—to the same niche? How did it capture our attention, and

why have we been unable to let it go? Perhaps it’s our collective upbringings in the

Church. There is something to be said, I think, about the similarity between the two

musical genres, and the purposes they serve—both can be used to mourn, to rejoice,

to pray. Both are healing instruments. Maybe it’s biological—a distant Eastern

European ancestor urging us to connect with our roots.

But maybe the secret is in the music itself; something about the rhythms and

intonations, the flattened, dissonant scales, the sharp and emotive voices. What

captured Anna’s attention is what captured Elizabeth’s and mine: the ability of this

music to hold the weight of collective history, to communicate so much so simply,

through voice alone. It doesn’t matter that the official culture does not belong to us,

because the sentiment is the same: the music’s power to communicate belonging and

belief plucks at the delicate strings of our humanity.

✽ ✽ ✽

We stand around the fire, its embers burning deep red and hot copper. It is

silent except for the reverberation of our voices across the field, our echoes rippling

through blades of grass and scattered soil. Our voices, in the air, are no longer ours;

collectively, we release. The fire hisses and spits. We are silent for what feels like

minutes, processing the gravity of the music we just made. Once we speak, we will

have to reckon with reality—our voices will return to us—so we hold the enormity

of the music inside of ourselves and in the wind.

Slavei is holding a supra, a traditional Georgian social gathering that involves

feasts, drinking, and celebration. Our version, far removed from Georgian cultural

tradition, is somewhat inauthentic—we have no food, we drink cheap red wine from

hefty jugs, and we are shivering around a fire on Wesleyan’s Long Lane Farm in the

middle of April. But the sentiment remains the same: it is a festive gathering,

communal and introspective. These supras are held every few weeks by Slavei. Often,

they are potlucks—we take turns bringing elaborate salads, dishes of creamy pasta,

charred vegetables, homemade sourdough bread. We frequently invite guests, loved

ones who appreciate the rarity and significance of these gatherings. And at these

supras we make toasts: to each other, to our voices, to the songs that mean so much

to us. In Georgian: gaumarjos, gagimarjos, gaguimarjos—To victory, to your victory, to our

victory.

We have just finished singing “A, Što Ćemo,” a Bosnian folk song. The lyrics

are romantic, but the melody is incessant and haunting; we don’t need an English

translation to understand that the song is about heartbreak, loss. It begins with a

duet, one high voice and one middle part, and they sing mournfully and slowly. The

high voice holds a note and wavers upon it before the rest of the group joins in,

swelling at the chorus. We sound stoic, marching through grief.

il'me uzmi il'me ubi Either take me, or kill me

ne daj dame drugil jubi Don't let another kiss me

srce više nijemoje Heart is no longer mine

tebi draga pripaloje To you, my dear, it started belonging.

The long pause; our voices in the wind; the fire murmuring. Breaking the

silence, a Slavei member, with a poignant earnestness in her voice: I’m just so grateful

that we all ended up here in this moment… She’s right—this moment feels temporary,

serendipitous. The song, though it tells the story of a stranger’s heartbreak, in

another country and at a different time, feels like our song, our heartbreak. To our

victory. It’s almost sacred.

Interlude: “Into the Mystic”

Our family friends host themed music nights once a year. The mother, a

musician and an artist, invites all her friends and acquaintances and strangers with

nothing in common to make music together in her living room. The theme this year

is Van Morrison. My dad plays me Morrison’s songs, which I come to love. His

songs convey a sense of absoluteness. The stable guitar is gentle but not soft; the

horns glide; his voice, smooth and assured, reminds us not to worry. The room

buzzes with sound—aimless chatter, electric hum from the amp, kids running their

fingers down the length of the piano. The night is a real coming-together, strange

unity through music.

The mother has two sons, except now she only has one because her

eighteen-year-old dies in his sleep and her husband gets cancer and her brother kills

himself and now we can’t go to the themed music nights because it’s too sad for

everyone.

I enter uncharted territory: music becomes heavy, untouchable, marked with

too much grief to revisit. Songs, I know now, are malleable—their meanings change,

and with it, our memories of them.

Interlude: “Blue”

The day before our high school graduation, my friend and I drive aimlessly

around Massachusetts suburbia. Like soon-to-be ghosts, we visit our spots: the

Qdoba at the strip mall, Coffee Break café, Houghton’s Pond at the nature

reservation. We feel years older than we really are, both claustrophobic and

agoraphobic—too old for high school but too soft, still, for the real world. Half-

baked, we joke. Sitting on the worn couch, picking at its cracked brown leather, I

realize: this couch is too comfortable, and I feel like I’m sinking deep into its

cavernous corners. This place is too comfortable, too familiar.

Our soundtrack is Joni Mitchell’s album Blue. Joni gets it, we say to one

another; the intensity of our melancholy is held perfectly in her haunting voice,

though her songs are about love and heartbreak. Blue becomes, as we drive, the

sound of our in-betweenness. It memorializes our moment in time; we loop around

the block again.

Interlude: “Wuthering Heights”

The night before my eighteenth birthday, my friends gather in my backyard.

It’s late July, the air thick and hot, buzzing with mosquitoes and the echoes of

crickets. My mom and I spend the afternoon stringing twinkling lights around the

patio, laying out a floral tablecloth on the teakwood table, lighting tea candles in old

red yogurt jars. I spend an hour crafting a playlist of my favorite songs and my

friends’ favorite songs to play over dinner.

Around the table at dusk, we play “Wuthering Heights.” We spin around the

garden like Kate Bush in her music video, flinging our arms up and collapsing our

bodies to the high swoop of her voice. My friends and I laugh about the song’s

literary references, Kate’s strange devotion to Heathcliff and Cathy. I think: soon

things won’t be the same, and soon they aren’t. I’m entering adulthood, leaving for

college, forging new, unsteady friendships and learning how to be alone. But as we

dance I still feel like a kid; I still feel safe, loved, held.

Between Covers

Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” first emerged in my life not in its

original form, but through a cover by an obscure Glaswegian singer-songwriter

named Amy Macdonald. My family discovered Macdonald—and subsequently, the

cover—by chance. My father, perpetually on the hunt for new music, came across

her sophomore album, A Curious Thing, while browsing the album library on a

transatlantic flight in 2010. He liked it so much that he went out and bought it

immediately upon landing.

We were, at the time, living in Berlin, Germany; my parents had received

year-long fellowships to work there. I was nine years old, and my entire life had been

uprooted: I lived in a strange apartment, had new, temporary friends, and attempted

to learn an unfamiliar language. My whole life felt impermanent, transitory, but

music was a rare source of stability—my favorite Taylor Swift album, Speak Now,

sounded exactly the same anywhere in the world.

In the living room of our small, ground-floor apartment in the Grunewald,

nestled between stacks of novels and art books, sat a silver CD player. Most

afternoons, my father would pop a CD in the reader and work at the dinner table.

My brother and I would run in from the bare, dusty courtyard, turn the volume dial

all the way up, and return to whatever game we had invented that day—Hide and

Seek, Conkers, Witches. Amy Macdonald’s A Curious Thing became a staple of the

household; it played on repeat in the living room, and traveled with us in the car on

our way to school or on weekend trips to nearby towns, where we’d roam vast war

memorials and visit dead writers’ houses.

In retrospect, the album itself isn’t a standout; although the melodies and

guitar riffs are catchy, the lyrics and chord progressions loop simply and repetitively.

Though they share elements of grunge and folk, the songs are predictable pop. It is a

perfect family album—complex enough for adults, but basic enough for children.

The final track of the album, “What Happiness Means to Me,” is particularly bad; it’s

a cheesy ballad steeped in sentimentality. About a minute after the song ends,

however, a hidden track plays: the quiet spin of CD gives way to hushed guitar

picking, and a slow, somber version of “Dancing in the Dark” begins.

The original Springsteen song is upbeat, exploding with a barrage of

synthesizers and horns, the persistent beat of the drum driving the melody forward.

Macdonald’s version is pared-down and slowed down, just her clear voice and the

guitar. Her voice is raw and unfiltered, her thick Glaswegian accent enunciating each

word perfectly on the note. She sings the final line, a third repetition of Even if we’re

just dancing in the dark unaccompanied, and the guitar plucks a final resolving chord as

her voice echoes; a chorus of applause and cheering fills the resounding silence.

Danke Schön, Macdonald says bashfully, her Scottish accent distinct even through the

German. A live recording, nestled secretly in the recesses of the album. It’s only

upon relistening to the hidden track years later that I hear Danke Schön; she must

have been performing for a German audience. Our discovery of her during our year

in Berlin feels fateful. It’s almost as if she was speaking to us: Thank you, she said.

Thank you, we responded.

Macdonald’s version feels soulful, self-reflective. Without the embellishment

of the original song’s production, she relies on the emotional resonance of her own

voice. She manages to locate—and pry open—a palpable tension, one that is present

but not highlighted in Springsteen’s version. Macdonald’s “Dancing in the Dark”

probes at both the melancholic and the hopeful. The simplicity of the

accompaniment accentuates the lyrics more richly than Springsteen’s version:

I get up in the evenin'

And I ain't got nothin' to say

I come home in the mornin'

I go to bed feelin' the same way

I ain't nothin' but tired

Man, I'm just tired and bored with myself

Hey there, baby, I could use just a little help

And in the second verse:

I check my look in the mirror

Wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face

Man, I ain't gettin' nowhere

I'm just livin' in a dump like this

The lyrics are despondent, and Macdonald’s clear, slow cadence adds

desperation to them. But at the same time, she sounds assured; there’s an air of

anticipation in the more uplifting lyrics that follow:

There's somethin' happenin' somewhere

Baby, I just know that there is

And in the final chorus:

You can't start a fire

Sittin' 'round cryin' over a broken heart

This gun's for hire

Even if we're just dancin' in the dark

You can't start a fire

Worryin' about your little world fallin' apart

This gun's for hire

Even if we're just dancin' in the dark

She manages to build up to these lines without instrumental force, using just

vocal intonation and guitar accompaniment; her voice becomes dense and mighty.

Each word feels like a weighty blow.

I wonder how many people have heard this recording. Macdonald is a

relatively unknown singer to begin with, and the track is a hidden surprise. My family

only discovered it because we played the CD on a loop for hours on end; we let the

final song finish and waited for the first to begin again, unaware of what was to

come. At nine, I didn’t know that “Dancing in the Dark” was a cover. I assumed it

was Macdonald’s original until my parents played me Springsteen’s version. Hers is

better. I’m not sure if I feel that way purely because of my early exposure to her

recording—and thus a persistent nostalgia for the song and that period of my life—

but I suspect that I would prefer her version regardless. I can picture Macdonald in a

small, dark room, performing for an intimate audience; Springsteen’s version, much

more anthemic, feels as though it was written to be played at sold-out stadium

shows. Although Springsteen also evokes a sense of anguish, that feeling is masked

by the upbeat drum tempo, lively horns, and his rough, raspy voice. Both recordings

are plaintively earnest, but Springsteen’s version counteracts that earnestness with

overproduction. He drives the listener instead towards the heroic American dream,

while Macdonald investigates the discontent that fuels his escapist desire.

✽ ✽ ✽

I don’t remember when I heard Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” for the

first time. All I know is that after I heard Macdonald’s version, I couldn’t shake the

song. Years later, I began singing at my high school’s open mic concerts; I

performed a number of poorly piano-accompanied Ed Sheeran songs (back when he

was still a singer-songwriter, and not a Top-40 sellout). At some point, my mother

suggested I try to learn “Dancing in the Dark”—Amy Macdonald’s version, she said,

because her voice is so beautiful and it would really suit you. The guitar chords were easy: G,

Em, C, Am, and D in a repetitive loop, a classic pop-rock bassline. Even a novice

like me could learn them.

I first performed “Dancing in the Dark” in the spring of my senior year of

high school, at an after-school open mic. I went to a private school in suburban

Massachusetts with a sprawling campus—stately red-brick buildings were bifurcated

by large green quads and budding trees. My classmates were intellectuals and

creatives like myself. A few of my peers ran an arts and literature magazine called

Magus Mabus which organized monthly student-run open mic concerts. The open

mic, affectionately titled Beatnik, was held on the back porch of one of the libraries

on campus on a Friday evening in late May. String lights adorned the wrought-iron

fence around the porch; students gathered on the lawn, unfurling blankets to sit on

or wrap themselves in; plastic tables offered industrial quantities of chips and greasy

pizza. One by one, we performed for our classmates—poetry, original rap verses,

gently altered covers of well-known and well-loved songs. I performed later; the sun

had set, and I was illuminated only by the lights dancing behind my head. I sat on a

folding chair, guitar balanced on my knees and my lips pressed against the mic, and

shakily strummed the song I knew so well. When I listen to the grainy video my

friends took of me that night, I’m surprised by how assured my voice sounds; I’m

surprised by how much I sound like Amy Macdonald, clear and bright and defiant.

“Dancing in the Dark” was my go-to. If, perched on my bed, a friend asked

me to play a song, I’d unthinkingly launch into my rendition. I knew all the chords

and words by heart, knew where my voice was supposed to swell and where it was

supposed to ebb. It was my song. It suited me—my voice, I felt, and my restless and

introspective personality. As I sang I would close my eyes and listen to the lyrics.

Each time, I was overwhelmed by the weight of the words, their simultaneous

despondency and promise.

I sang it twice, too, with my father’s band in Bennington, Vermont: once

Amy’s way, and once Bruce’s. We performed Springsteen’s version first, a cacophony

of instruments jostling against one another in the small room, the thumping drum

persistent as ever. After that performance, my father and I both agreed that

Macdonald’s version remained superior; at the next concert, six months later, we

reverted. That time, I stood in front of the microphone with my guitar, accompanied

only by my father’s friend, Lee, on the double bass. Lee carved ribbons of sound

from the double bass with his bow, surging against my steady voice. The audience

was silent as I sang. Afterward, a woman in her early thirties approached me and

thanked me for my performance. It seems like it took a lot out of you—emotionally, she

said. I’d never thought about it that way, but I suppose it did. I felt—and still feel—a

keen and singular connection to that song, and to Macdonald’s version. She brings a

necessary gravity and significance to “Dancing in the Dark,” and I wanted to honor

that.

Yet I always harbored a sneaking sense of guilt after performing Macdonald’s

version of “Dancing in the Dark.” Friends and strangers would tell me how much

they loved my twist on the classic Bruce Springsteen hit. I was pleased by the

compliment, and then ashamed to admit that it wasn’t my twist on the song at all. I

was ripping off a beautiful—and, in my opinion, criminally unknown—cover of the

original. Most of the time, I just accepted the compliment; I knew that attempting to

explain Amy Macdonald would make no impression whatsoever.

But it’s also true that I was not, and have never been, performing her version

of the song; I’ve been performing my own cover of Macdonald’s cover of

Springsteen’s original. My version is inspired by—but can never be fully identical

to—Macdonald’s. We do not often think of covers as a musical genre, but the

category is helpfully vague, and easily malleable. Once a song is put into the world,

any ownership of it is released; it becomes open to reinterpretation.

I’ve always sung covers; while I love to sing, I’ve never been able to write

original music, and so I’ve had to settle for covering. As a child, I dreamed of being a

singer. I spent my weekends aimlessly wandering around the house, singing at the

top of my lungs. At school, I was teased by other kids for singing under my breath as

I worked at my desk. I have countless home-video recordings of myself poised in

front of the camera, wearing drugstore lip gloss and mascara, announcing my latest

arrangement of an Adele song. I was confident, shameless. I decided that in order to

succeed, I must write my own songs. I tried, at ten, and produced a monstrosity I

titled “Life is the Revenge of the Nerds”—appropriately angsty for a fifth grader, but

everything else about it was terrible: the lyrics were nonsensical and the tune was

primitive. I tried again in high school, convinced I must have developed the skill I

had lacked at ten: still no success. It felt like a double failure—music and writing

were the two subjects I excelled at. Songwriting should have been my thing, but my

lyrics were dull, my melodies borderline stolen. I was ashamed at my failure; I

resigned myself to singing half-hearted covers in the privacy of my bedroom. This

inability to write songs has always been a disappointment to me. I don’t feel wholly

qualified to call myself a musician; rather, I’m a person who covers. But there’s a

secret skill, a kind of creativity, in covering. To take an existing piece of art and use it

to construct something distinct and different requires a deep understanding of the

music and the musician.

To me, Macdonald’s and Springsteen’s versions of “Dancing in the Dark” are

two different songs. Not only do the two recordings evoke completely separate

emotions in the listener, but they’re born of disparate contexts. Springsteen, a New

Jersey native, has built his whole career around an attempt to represent male,

working-class American life; he sings in pursuit of the American dream. Indeed,

some could argue that this is the central subject of all late 20th century American

rock music. Geoffrey Himes, in Born in the U.S.A, contends that “the lure of the

escape hatch had always been a central myth in rock ‘n’ roll [...] You could grab the

car keys and light out for a new territory where the camaraderie was real, the music

was righteous and the sex was good. It was an update of the American frontier myth

for a new generation” (4). “Dancing in the Dark” epitomizes this perhaps fantastical

search. Born in the U.S.A, from which “Dancing in the Dark” is the most-streamed

track, was released in 1984 and was written, according to Springsteen, as an attempt

to represent the experiences of struggling Vietnam veterans.

Amy Macdonald grew up in East Dunbartonshire, Scotland, a semi-rural area

outside of Glasgow. “Dancing in the Dark” had existed in the world for three years

before she was born in 1987. It’s unclear when her live version was performed and

recorded—the album in which it is hidden does not exist on streaming services—but

A Curious Thing was released in 2010, almost thirty years after the original song’s

debut. Macdonald and Springsteen do share some similarities—she, too, tends to

explore mundanity in her songs, singing about starting a band with her lover or

fireworks on the Fourth of July. But Macdonald’s music is emblematic of a more

contemporary generation; it takes the shape of a new social and political culture, one

informed by—but far removed from—that of the ‘80s.

✽ ✽ ✽

The cover, as a genre, lends itself to constant (re)interpretation, towards

rebirth. It sustains songs that might otherwise die in the archives; it defies the

boundaries of the historical and cultural contexts of the song’s origins. To cover is

also to write, to report; in a sense, I’m constantly engaged in the act of covering—as

an essayist, specifically here an essayist writing about music, I am recontextualizing

and reinterpreting songs and presenting them to the reader with my own opinions,

biases, and subversions. I am covering as I write, covering as I sing. Cover, also, implies

a kind of smothering or suffocation; a musical cover, then, would seem to snuff out

the original. Instead, covers provide longevity—almost immortality—to the originals,

through their very interpretations. The cover and the original engage in a kind of

symbiosis: the cover cannot exist without the original, and the original cannot

survive without the cover. It’s virtually impossible to exactly reproduce an original;

arguably, artists are even covering their own songs when they perform them live. The

re-interpretive differences in covers are crucial. Covers are most powerful when they

isolate and explode a singular emotion located within the original—this is what

Macdonald does.

I’ve always been drawn to covers—there’s something thrilling about listening

to a new song and realizing that I know it already, and yet I don’t. In my avid

consumption of the genre—I have a three-hour long playlist of covers alone—I’ve

noticed that many artists gravitate towards Springsteen songs. In particular, female

artists love Springsteen: alongside Amy Macdonald, both Lucy Dacus and Faye

Webster, two hugely popular contemporary indie artists in my social sphere, have

covered “Dancing in the Dark.” Each of theirs is individual, and distinct from

Macdonald’s version; both evoke particular emotions, through the singer’s voices

and instrumental accompaniment. Dacus’s version is upbeat, sassy; Webster

experiments with the rhythm of the drums and lyrics, creating a floating, yearning

effect. Another of my favorite artists, an Australian singer-songwriter named Angie

McMahon, covered the Springsteen song “The River.” This cover is significantly

slowed down and accompanied only by piano, allowing her voice to shine. The effect

is mournful. McMahon’s voice, reminiscent of Chrissy Hynde’s, and indeed of

Macdonald’s, is deeply resonant. She, like Macdonald, taps into an anguish that

lingers under the surface of many of Springsteen’s songs.

What about Springsteen’s music is so attractive to these women—and to me?

His songwriting strives to embody the lived—or fantasized—experience of the

American man; what are these younger women, some of them not American, able to

locate in his music that so draws them to it? Are they reinterpreting it for the female

experience? Is it some sort of feminist reclamation? I’m not sure. I do think, though,

that their renditions unearth a thread of existential unease that runs through

Springsteen’s songs—one that is, perhaps paradoxically, all too common to the

experience of American womanhood. Western womanhood, though not monolithic,

must often contend with estrangement: mythic American culture is fundamentally

male, a land of trucks and guns. Indeed, the pulse of restless discontent that

Springsteen strives to escape, and that Macdonald settles into, is undeniably similar

to the uneasy anxiety that permeated my childhood, my adolescence, and even my

early adulthood: I always felt slightly outside of life—as though I was waiting for

something to happen, though I didn’t know exactly what. My intense, wavering

emotions overwhelmed me constantly. The strength of these female artists lies in

their ability to embody that tension in their covers.

✽ ✽ ✽

I’ve realized, writing this, that I am also engaged in the act of covering as a

member of Slavei. Before beginning this piece, I had never considered Slavei to be a

cover group, although that’s exactly what we are. Because the music is foreign to

many of us, we resist the label. We think of ourselves as engaging in some kind of

cultural appreciation, or appropriation: an important melding of two worlds. But just

as it is almost impossible to perfectly reproduce an original piece of rock or pop, it is

impossible to perfectly reproduce an Eastern European folk song. Every year, as we

teach our new members the songs we were taught, the music becomes almost new: it

molts, changes shape.

Just a few weeks ago, standing in the vast and austere Memorial Chapel, a

member of Slavei remarked that she had been listening to an old recording of a song

of ours from a few years prior, and she’d realized that the middle part we sing now is

significantly different from back then. None of the people singing in the recording

she’d listened to belonged to Slavei any more—they’d graduated years ago. We think

of the songs we sing as fixed: historic mementos, directly linked to the original

versions and their significance. In fact, our songs have been contorted and

transformed by years of re-teaching and relearning; our versions are like stones

worked smooth by decades of ocean. Gradually, our harmonies modulate and our

dynamics shift; some of our songs become more mournful, more balladic. Without

realizing it, Slavei is constantly involved in reinterpretation—in the act of covering.

But unlike contemporary covers of Bruce Springsteen, we have few original

recordings to refer to. Our songs are ephemeral, and we rely on memory in order to

preserve them. Our songs are not intentionally different from the originals; they are

inadvertently reinvented. Nevertheless, our practice is similar to Amy Macdonald’s,

to Lucy Dacus’s and Faye Webster’s, similar to Angie McMahon’s. It’s a labor of

musical love, born out of a mutual desire to engage with the music individually and

collectively, to understand it deeply, personally, and boundlessly.

✽ ✽ ✽

I stopped singing “Dancing in the Dark” in college. It felt too reminiscent of

my childhood and adolescence, too tied to my musical upbringing and my parents’

influence. I wanted to establish myself as independent of their authority, even

musical. Besides, I didn’t have anywhere to sing it—aside from Slavei, I had nowhere

to perform. Yet, picking up my guitar in the solitude of my room, my still fingers

instinctually shape themselves around the chords of the song: muscle memory.

Alone, I strum the chords slowly and surely, hum the melody I know so well, retreat

into my inward world.

Interlude: “Angelina”

I soon learn college is lonely. I spend my early mornings in class, my lunch

breaks with the same three friends I don’t particularly like, my late nights under the

uninviting fluorescent light of the Science Library. Each day is the same, each day

unmemorable. The winter feels colder in Connecticut than it ever did in

Massachusetts; I trudge around campus in the four pm dusk, my cheeks burning with

frost, headphones plugged in. I listen to “Angelina” by Pinegrove and think about

my old life, which made so much more sense to me than this new one. Pinegrove’s

grungy, Midwestern-emo style—punchy guitar and the lead singer’s needling, nasal

voice—invites this kind of earnest, agitated introspection: I don’t understand anything /

Violent angles from side to side / How’d you get so tangled up in my life? I text my old friends,

call my mom, listen to another Pinegrove song and thank music for acting as a

lifeline, a steady bulwark against the disarming uncertainty of my new world.

Interlude: “Hannah Sun”

Spring of sophomore year of college, lonelier than I’ve ever been. I eat all my

meals out of paper boxes on the dirty rug with my roommate, take class at my

cramped desk with the camera turned off, spend hours every day scrolling through

my phone.

My roommate and I listen to “Hannah Sun” by Lomelda over and over. The

song is simultaneously hopeless and hopeful, just like us; the singer’s voice sounds

almost spectral, the melody forlorn, the chords incessantly minor.

One night, we leave a candle flickering in my room, stare wide-eyed at the

full moon and come back in. Lomelda whispers mournfully from the speaker

between us. I say, I feel so different than I did two weeks ago listening to this song. I’m so much

happier. But I know it’s a lie and she knows it’s a lie so she just smiles wanly and nods.

Time is static, and we are static: music cements this slow moving, this stilling of time

and ourselves.

I listen to “Hannah Sun” and time stills again.

Interlude: “Night Shift”

Junior year of college, I spend the evening with new friends. Our

conversation moves through polite small talk to deft banter, and lands on music.

One friend plays guitar; another sits behind the drums. I perch on the couch,

microphone propped in my hands, and we play together. It’s jerky—we speed up and

then slow down, play the wrong chord, skip a line. But we’re electric; we play late

into the night, trading songs back and forth.

We decide to enter a school cover band competition; we choose Lucy Dacus.

We spend the week before the concert rehearsing in my new friends’ cramped

apartment, ironing out each drum kick and each breath. Early spring, the floors are

still gritty from snow salt; the living room is cluttered, decorated with musical

instruments and film posters. On the night of the performance, we wear matching

outfits: white wife beaters and black pants. Our set is just three songs long; the last

song we play is “Night Shift.” The song starts slow, just me and quiet guitar. But

when I sing, it’s not like we practiced. Hundreds of voices echo the lyrics back to me,

eclipsing the melody. I realize I’m not singing alone; I’m accompanied by every

audience member who knows the song, every person for whom this music is

meaningful.

The final lines of the song are loud: I belt the lyrics while my friends hammer

the guitar and crash the drums. As we finish, I’m drowned out by the ringing voices

of the audience. The room seems to swell, seems to take on its own shape. In that

moment, music feels so much larger than me; I am reminded of the collective

experience of song.

Projections

In 1958, French composer Olivier Messiaen completed his thirteen-piece

composition, Catalogue d’oiseaux—Catalogue of Birds. Captivated by birdsong since

his youth, Messiaen had set out to compose a series of pieces for solo piano that

mimicked the animal’s tune: he listened to hundreds of recordings of the blue rock

thrush, the woodlark, the golden oriole. The result is experimental, and not

traditionally beautiful. The piano notes warble up and down octaves, defying any sort

of recognizable, self-contained classical movement; the music resists orthodox

harmony and resolution, often sounding harsh and discordant. But the pieces really

do evoke birdsong: as I listen, I can picture small, plump, brightly feathered birds

and their clipped whistles, nestled high up in abundantly blooming trees.

In 1952, in preparation for Catalogue d’oiseaux, Messiaen met with Jacques

Delamain, an ornithologist. According to Messiaen, “It was Delamain who taught

[him] to recognise a bird from its song, without having to see its plumage or the

shape of its beak.” Voice is an extension of the body; but with Catalogue d’oiseaux,

Messiaen attempted to understand the body through the voice. He viewed birdsong

as both independent from and representative of the animal’s physicality. He didn’t

need to see the bird’s feathers or beak—through sound alone, he could identify and

picture the bird-musician. In his compositions, he was able to conjure up those birds.

My father, in his middle-age, began to obsess over birdsong. He would sit on

our back stairs if it was sunny, or in our kitchen with the window open if it wasn’t,

and listen to the repetitive two-note warble emitted from somewhere in our

backyard. At dinner, the windows still open, he’d whistle the tune he’d picked up

from the birds in the backyard, and he’d tell me about it: he would point out the

exact interval between the two notes of the birdsong—a minor third—and then he’d

identify the bird, in this case the call of a mating male chickadee. When he couldn't

recognize the species through its song, he would record the melody and upload it to

a series of obscure Reddit threads, asking experts for their opinions.

At first, I found this sad, or comic-sad—I felt my dad had lost it, was

descending into the mildly eccentric mundanity of middle age, and here was the

proof. But listening to Messiaen, I began to share my father’s preoccupation: through

birdsong, I started to understand music-making as something animalistic, innate. I

often think of musicianship as a skill, an application or technology beyond ordinary

embodied existence which requires rigorous practice in order to improve. Musicians

make a distinction between those with musical talent—an ear—and those who are

tone-deaf, incapable of ever producing beautiful music. But a bird’s tune is simple,

reflexive, un-practiced, a mating call or a marker of territory. If a bird’s music is just

personal noise-making, perhaps we should reframe our understanding of human

musicianship to create a space for innate and embodied noise-making, for music as

primal communication.

In his Essay on the Origin of Languages, Rousseau asserts:

Writing, which might be expected to stabilize language, is precisely

what adulterates it; it changes not its words but its genius; it

substitutes precision for expressiveness. One conveys one’s

sentiments in speaking, and one’s ideas in writing. In writing one is

forced to use every word in conformity with common usage, but a

speaker alters meanings by his tone of voice, determining them as he

wishes; since he is less constrained to be clear, he stresses

forcefulness more, and a language that is written cannot possibly

retain for long the liveliness of one that is only spoken. What gets

written down are words [voix], not sounds; yet in an accented

language it is the sounds, the accents, the inflections of every sort,

that constitute the greatest part of the vigor of the language.

Rousseau believes the voice—in this case, the spoken word—to be more

authentic, more unadulterated, than writing. The voice expresses feeling and

emotion, while writing imposes logic and reason. Although Rousseau is discoursing

here about written versus spoken language rather than singing, and although his

binarism between speech and writing enacts a distinctly Romantic emphasis—a

privileging of the natural over the social—this passage is still usefully applicable to

the musical realm. The voice is malleable, able to convey and effect a broad range of

emotions through tone and quality alone. As Rousseau argues, “a speaker alters

meanings by his tone of voice”—and indeed, it is “the sounds, the accents, the

inflections [...] that constitute the greatest part of the vigor of the language.” The

voice also has a unique vivacity—a “liveliness”—that is difficult to emulate either in

writing or by playing other musical instruments. Rousseau seems to suggest that the

voice is more innate than any other form of communication—that its superiority, its

primacy, lies in its origination within the body, serving as a physical manifestation of

identity and personhood. This primacy is what Messiaen’s music works towards: a

return to our most inherent, animalistic, and authentic forms of communication and

identification. Birds sing to communicate something internal; we, too, can externalize

our feelings through song. Our sounds, accents, and inflections can convey and

manipulate dimensions of meaning.

✽ ✽ ✽

When I was eleven, I began taking voice lessons and singing in an a cappella

group at the New England Conservatory in downtown Boston. My mother had seen

the voice instructor’s advertisement at the music school where I took piano lessons;

she thought I might like to learn from a professional, since I always said I wanted to

be a singer. Both the private lesson and the group met on Saturday mornings in a

room that had once been an apartment, with low ceilings and light wood paneling. I

usually had an hour after my lesson and before group rehearsal, which I spent at

Pavement Coffee shop, reading a book and drinking hot chocolate, people-watching

through the wide windows that looked out onto Gainsborough Street. A few times a

semester, on Saturday evenings, the girls in my a cappella group gathered in long

black dresses and performed a concert for an audience at Jordan Hall, a vast concert

space with semi-circular rows of velvet seats and high ceilings. We stood in a half-

moon on stage, our awkward adolescent bodies turned inwards towards each other,

illuminated by the hot lights of the concert hall. Our voices flooded the room. I also

performed at voice recitals, which were decidedly less grand: students’ parents sat in

squeaky plastic folding chairs and filmed us on their iPhones as we sang one by one.

The instructors brought in pianists from the Conservatory to accompany us; trying

my best to stand up straight and tugging self-consciously at my skirt, I stood in front

of the piano and pushed my voice up and out.

Both the lesson and the group were taught by Cristi Catt, a tall, lanky

woman of indeterminate age. I don’t know how old she was—her blond hair was

almost silver and her skin was beginning to wrinkle, but she held such a grounded

ease in her body that she felt truly youthful. Cristi Catt’s approach to music was

deeply holistic, inseparable from the physical habitation of her body. Each session

began with a physical warm up: standing, we’d fold our bodies in half, then roll up

again one vertebra at a time. Often, to warm up our voices we’d sing sirens, starting

from the lowest note in our register and swooping up to the highest; as we began,

we’d collapse our bodies to the floor and then reach our fingertips towards the

ceiling as we crescendoed. We paid special attention to the neck, cheeks, and mouth;

we’d rub our hands against each other to create warmth and then press our palms

against the sides of our faces, loosening as many muscles as we could. Sometimes,

during rehearsal, she’d halt us in the middle of a song and ask us to form a massage

train; standing in a circle, we’d dig our fingers into the knots of our neighbors’

shoulders, and run our hands down either side of their spines. She instructed us

never to stand with our hands clasped in front of our bodies—this posture collapsed

our lungs and diaphragm, she told us, blocking our airways.

The idea that the body and voice were symbiotically connected was

revolutionary to me. I’d never conceived of the body as something intrinsically

related to my voice. Before Cristi Catt, I’d only ever sung in my church choir; though

I received a strong musical theory education, our organist and choir-master had been

much more interested in making sure we were singing the right notes than in

attempting to control how we were singing.

When I came to Cristi Catt, the only songs in my repertoire were hymns and

Top-40 pop hits. I used to spend afternoons alone in my room, practicing Adele and

Taylor Swift and Katy Perry in the mirror. During voice lessons I sang jazz, blues,

American opera, contemporary pop, folk, opera. Cristi Catt told me my voice was

too breathy; I’d taught myself to sing in the style of my favorite pop singers, and I

was letting too much air into my notes and between my vocal chords. The effect was

muted, dreamy, almost sultry, but it wasn't good vocal practice; my singing had no

strength, my notes no direction. Without energy and power, I sounded lackluster. I

landed flat. My voice was soft, dull around the edges; Cristi Catt wanted it to be tight,

sharp.

I was resistant. I thought I sounded good—or at least I thought I sounded

how I was supposed to sound, a model of passive femininity. I didn’t want to be too

loud, too harsh, too disruptive. I refused to sing the way she wanted me to; I didn’t

even know how. Cristi Catt tried various approaches: she sang and asked me to

mimic her style; she instructed me to belt at the top of my lungs. Nothing worked,

until she told me to start throwing things at her. She handed me rolls of tape, CDs,

paperweights—any old knickknack lying around the room—and asked me to toss

them at her, gently, as I sang a single note. To my surprise—and almost by

accident—the notes began flooding out of me with force. Every week I returned to

Cristi Catt’s office and threw things at her and my voice became stronger, sharper,

more powerful. Music became an exchange, an external, physical thing; notes became

material, something I could give to, or throw at, my voice teacher.

Now when I sing, the act is simultaneously internal and external; it is both

nebulous and concrete, physical and spiritual. This is true of any music-making, any

instrumental performance—it is both a private, personal act and a public gift one

gives to another. When music is performed it becomes actualized, becomes material.

The notes originate in my head and emerge from my lungs, up through my sternum

and lips and settle in the ears of the listeners. When I sing, a melody that has existed

only in my mind begins to belong concretely to others.

✽ ✽ ✽

Slavei auditions consist of four steps: singing a duet, mimicking rhythm, a

pitch battle, and hard voice. Having now conducted auditions for the past two years,

I’m intimately familiar with the process, but when I first joined, these things were all

new to me. The duet is simple: two repetitive lines from a song, sung alone once and

then a second time with a partner. Slavic musical rhythms are often twisted and

unfamiliar, straying from the traditional Western 4/4, and so we hum a song over

and over and ask the auditioners to join in as they become comfortable with the

song’s rhythm; we slap our hands on the sides of our thighs to keep count as we

sing. Our music is often dissonant, full of unexpected half-step intervals, so we

conduct what we affectionately call a “pitch battle”: auditioners sing a single note,

and a Slavei voice hovers around that note, swooping up and down the scale,

stretching open any gaps of disharmony.

Hard voice is theoretically the easiest task in the audition process; we ask

auditioners to sing a single note as loud and hard as they possibly can—devoid of any

air or any softness. Although this step in the audition process appears simple, it’s

often the task auditioners find hardest; they struggle to conceptualize the unfamiliar

sound of hard voice, and they’re unsure how to produce that sound within themselves.

When I first auditioned, I was told to imagine that I was sending a beam of light out

from my core and across the space, so that’s what I tell others to do. Though we

don’t ask people auditioning for Slavei to throw rolls of tape across the room, we

essentially demand the same thing of them as Cristi Catt demanded of me when I

was eleven: we ask them to use their voices as concrete objects, to consider their

voices externalized appendages of their internal selves.

✽ ✽ ✽

Is it significant that Cristi Catt, a woman, taught pubescent adolescents to

ground ourselves in our bodies? I grew up in a cultural environment that encourages

girls, above almost all else, to be skinny. Many of us learn very early to destroy our

bodies rather than to nurture them. Grounding myself in my body is scary—to love

and trust it requires careful, slow, intentional practice. What does it mean to be a

woman embodied? What does it mean to radically defy the pressures surrounding

me? What does it mean to treat my body as a capable instrument instead of a

dispensable vessel?

I wonder if it’s even possible to disentangle the music of female singers from

their physical presentations. I think of the celebrated androgyny of the ‘80s—Annie

Lennox with her short hair, boyish frame, and dress shirts and suit jackets. Or the

‘90s Riot Grrrl movement: constructed as a tool for sociopolitical revolt through

music, but often reduced in the media to a stereotype, rife with comments about the

Riot Grrrls’ visual style—punky outfits and visible body hair. Female artists,

particularly successful ones, seem often to be constrained by an idealized image—

one that comes to represent both the art and the artist. Take, for instance, Amy

Winehouse: she was instantly recognizable not just by her voice but by her

appearance, her slew of tattoos, huge hair and thick eyeliner. Or Madonna, whose

face I picture from the cover of her 1986 album True Blue, which my family owned

on CD: eyes closed, her head is thrown back in profile, her tight blonde curls

practically in motion. Her dark, overlined lips are stark against pale skin—the photo

exudes confident sexuality. Sinéad O’Connor attempted to distance herself from

traditional femininity by shaving her head, but was reduced to a caricature of a bald,

angry feminist; her shaved head was arguably her best known attribute. Amy,

Madonna, and Sinéad were not all popular during the same musical period; they have

distinct and individual voices, lives, personas. And yet they are all identifiable by their

image. These women’s bodies are in service to their music, but not in the way that

Cristi Catt taught us; rather, these women’s bodies—costumed, made up,

manipulated—become a marketing tool. How can female musicians sing

authentically, as I learned to do in adolescence, when their bodies are commodified

for public consumption?

Being a woman and a musician sometimes feels to me paradoxical. It feels as

though too many things are too hard to get right—the perfect image, the elusive

persona, the effortless music taste, the ease in one’s own skin. In “Double-Digit

Jukebox: An Essay in Eight Mixes,” Leslie Jamison writes about copying her

boyfriend’s music taste and feeling that she consumes music “wrong” somehow:

In truth, I’d been eager to adopt Dave’s taste in music because it felt

far more subtle and sophisticated than my own. It was like preferring

sashimi to birthday cake. Even when I genuinely loved his songs, [...]

I still loved them wrong, somehow—loved them too much, listening

to them over and over again, binging on them like I binged on

pastries and wine. I always wanted too much [...] Restraint was never

my jam. Jam was my jam: infinite sweetness, infinite feeling, infinite

song.

I’m deeply moved by the idea of someone loving songs “wrong”—treating

music like an unwanted addiction, something that elicits a reflexive physical response

that proves, ultimately, a moral failing. It sounds almost absurd, and yet I’ve often

felt that it’s possible to love songs too much, possible to somehow corrupt them

with that love. In high school, I treated music taste like social media: I spent

afternoons crafting playlists on Spotify with niche, underground artists and songs I

didn’t even really like. I hoped that if a casual friend stumbled upon my profile they’d

be impressed by my musical knowledge. I thought I’d be rewarded for my

individuality; I understood my playlists to be a (constructed) representation of my

selfhood. If a classmate asked me my favorite band, I’d say something purposefully

obscure—Pond or The Walters or Electric Guest. Alone in my room, I blasted One

Direction and Taylor Swift, too embarrassed to admit that I loved these artists as

much as, if not more than, the anonymous bands populating my playlists. One

Direction, in particular, felt almost sinful—how could I admit that I loved a band

that catered to ditzy, delusional, boy-crazy teenage girls? To confess my love for One

Direction would be a blow to my integrity. Instead, I consumed music obsessively,

intensely, and often in secret.

I frequently felt, like Jamison, that the boys in my grade had a more “subtle”

or “sophisticated” music taste; I was confused by their casual fanship, their ability to

detach from the music at hand. Once, talking after class to my friend’s musically-

inclined boyfriend, I asked if he liked Bon Iver—Bon Iver was (and still is) one of

my most beloved bands. He responded with cool nonchalance: My friends and I are

pretty particular about the artists we listen to. Bon Iver’s not really my thing. I felt, in that

moment, the failure of my attachment; this boy held an easy authority over music

that I just couldn’t access.

When I was a junior in college, Spotify informed me that One Direction was

my number one most listened to artist of the year; not only that, I was in the top 3%

of all One Direction listeners on the app. High school me would have been

mortified—this was such a clear instance of inappropriate fandom, and the band was

One Direction! What had happened to the enigmatic musical persona I had so carefully

cultivated? What assumptions and judgements would my peers make about the kind

of person I was? But at twenty, I didn’t care anymore. Jamison likens listening to

music to binging on pastries and wine—listening as overindulgence. But what’s

wrong with eating and drinking? What’s wrong with savoring pastries and wine and

songs? What’s wrong with consuming music eagerly and often? I want to bite down

on a song, soften it with my spit, prod it with my tongue, isolate each sugary, fatty,

acidic flavor. I want to feel its pulpy mass sliding down my throat and sit with it as I

slowly digest. I want to eat too many songs too fast and let them stretch out the taut

skin of my bloated belly.

Jamison concludes her essay by announcing, “I discovered just how

liberating it can be to move beyond the words and live in the sound instead.” Like

Jamison, I learned to move beyond music as image and celebrate sound as pleasure

instead. Cristi Catt taught me to sing in my body—why would it be a failure to listen

to music in my body, too? Why is intellectual detachment more valuable than intense

and unrelenting passion? Carolyn Abbate, in the introduction to her translation of

Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Music and the Ineffable, says: “Music is [...] ‘drastic,’ not

‘gnostic’: works are made, brought into being by labor, and it is in the irreversible

experience of playing them or listening to them that the ‘meaning of their meaning’

is given voice.” We ascribe meaning to music as we produce or listen to it; there are

no rules about how to listen to it or how to make it. It is simply “given voice”—

actualized, made material—through our interactions with it, our attachment to it, our

fervent consumption of it.

✽ ✽ ✽

In the fall of my senior year, a few members of Slavei coordinated a

workshop with Nadia Tarnawsky, a Ukrainian-American folk singer and vocal coach.

We gathered around a table in a classroom in the Theater Department at Wesleyan

and introduced ourselves to Nadia, a heavy-set woman in intricately woven

traditional Ukrainian dress. Normally, Slavei doesn’t do any vocal warm-ups before

we sing; eager and short on time, we dive in immediately, straining our voices as we

weave in and out of harmony with one another. This time, however, Nadia led us in

a slow warm-up. We stood in a circle on the carpeted floor and shook out our limbs.

She told us about the importance of loosening our facial muscles, particularly those

above the teeth and in the cheeks and forehead, as we sing through those areas when

we sing Balkan music. We took deep, slow breaths and hissed as we exhaled, our

tongues trapped neatly between our teeth. She informed us that our diaphragm and

pelvic floor are connected; as we engage our diaphragm by inhaling and exhaling, our

pelvic floor muscles rise and fall. She led us in full-body stretches: we pulled our

heads towards our right shoulder and reached down towards the ground with our

left; we placed our hands on the ground and uncoiled one vertebrae at a time.

Rolling our heads gently around, our tense necks slackened with each revolution. As

singers, we’ve all been told before that our bodies are our instruments, that they’re

precious, but when she said this, I really believed her. Nadia reminded me of Cristi

Catt.

Nadia’s voice was like no other I’ve ever heard. Vast and booming, it swelled

through the thin white walls, unfurling across the quiet campus. A physical force, an

emotional release, a true thing of power. I was unnerved by her voice, both

impressed and envious. She taught us a traditional Ukrainian song often sung around

Christmas time—she learned it from a folk group in a small village in Ukraine. The

song has a low, middle, and high part; she told us that in Ukraine the majority of

voices sing the low and middle parts, allowing the high part, often called ‘The

Wanderer,’ to float above. She taught us each part, and then, one by one, asked us to

sing in front of the whole group.

She picked me first. I stood up at the table, and she paced behind me.

Singing the high part, I tried my best to emulate her expansive voice, pushing out

hard, guttural notes. She told me my effort was good, but my voice was too airy, not

hard and nasal like the Slavic women she sings with; suddenly I was eleven again,

hearing Cristi Catt say that my voice was too soft. Nadia told me to imagine I was a

farm animal—a sheep—and to sing as if I was baa-ing. Her suggestion sounded

ridiculous, but I conceded. As it emerged, my voice sounded almost foreign, like I

was playing an instrument I’d never touched before. Tight and angular, it coiled

around the room. I was unnerved, once again, by my body’s ability to produce such

sounds, my capacity to make air material. The melody felt solid, almost tangible, as it

surrounded us.

Now when I sing, I think about the ways my body has grown and changed

since I was eleven, and how my voice has changed with it—all the ways I’ve learned

to manipulate my instrument, all the fabrics and textures my voice has woven. I am

taller now; I have broad hips and strong thighs, a chest that rises and falls as I inhale

and exhale and a mouth that opens wide to sing my notes. My voice is deeper than at

eleven: richer, sharper, more complex. I wonder how I will sound in five years, in

twenty, in fifty.

Postlude: “Change”

Big Thief’s new album, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, comes out

in the early spring of my junior year of college. The songs are folky and electrifying,

marked by clattering guitar and Adrianne Lenker’s clear voice. Some of the songs

feel relentlessly hopeful, glittering with easy major chords; Lenker sings of certain,

stable love. Some songs throb dully with desperation, dragged down by heavy bass

and thudding drums. The album marks my spring, and follows me into summer—it

pulses slowly, rhythmically alongside my days. I listen to it as I walk to class, scuffing

my shoes against melting ice; it plays on the sundrenched rock at Miller’s Pond in

May, when I’m shirking my finals; it returns as I drive along winding, wisteria-lined

Cape Cod roads in June. These months feel transitional, unsteady; entering my senior

year of college, I can’t help but confront my temporary temporality. I feel like I’m

wading in a body of water that only seems to get deeper and muddier. The songs

cling to me as I swallow this strange uncertainty.

In February of my senior year, my friends and I go to a Big Thief concert in

New Haven. It’s the coldest day of winter; wrapped in scarves and puffy coats, we

crowd into the small concert venue. Adrianne Lenker is small and spritely, with elfin

ears and short cropped hair; her speaking voice is soft and velvety. She seems

reserved, almost shy. Flitting around the stage like an ethereal creature, she eats

grapes and cracks jokes with her band. I’m transfixed by Lenker: she sounds better

live than any recording could have suggested. Her singing voice is clear, determined,

kinetic. As her notes ring in my ear, I feel a settled warmth in my stomach, spreading

up through my chest, neck, and cheeks.

The band ends the concert with “Change.” The song is neither hopeful nor

desperate—it’s an act of reconciliation.

Change, like the wind

Like the water, like skin

Change, like the sky

Like the leaves, like a butterfly

Would you live forever, never die?

While everything around passes

Would you smile forever, never cry?

While everything you know passes

Quietly, I start to cry. Through Adrianne’s powerful voice, through her

poignant lyrics, I begin to reconcile my uncertainty and my conviction. I collect my

memories and my songs—each carefully crafted CD playlist for my father, each

Sunday service in the choir, each voice lesson with Cristi Catt and open mic

performance and intimate Slavei rehearsal—and I hold them up to the stage, let the

music bathe each one until they are soft and smooth. My body goes limp in the

steady, flush embrace of the crowd; I let Lenker’s voice hold me up.

Acknowledgements

This thesis was written under the guidance of Professors Lily Saint and Lisa

Cohen, both of whom asked me to take myself seriously as a writer. Professor Lily

Saint, thank you for agreeing to take on this project and for learning about music

alongside me. You taught me to write with authority. Your encouragement and

thoughtful, deliberate questioning propelled my writing forward immeasurably.

Professor Lisa Cohen, thank you for taking a chance on me, despite having never

met me. I will always remember, now, to write with great strangeness. I am so

grateful for your attentive, detailed feedback. Endless thanks to you both.

I workshopped the majority of my writing in Professor Douglas Martin’s

Senior Seminar in Creative Writing. I received such reflective, generative, and

valuable criticism in that class. Thank you, Douglas, and thank you to my

classmates.

While writing this thesis, I spoke with both my maternal aunt, Elizabeth

Messud, and my paternal aunt, Anna Wood. I asked them personal and intimate

questions about their upbringings, families, and passions. Elizabeth and Anna, thank

you for sharing your thoughts so generously with me; you both graciously excavated

memories and details from thirty years ago, and offered up stories I’ll hold with me

for a long while. Thank you for your time; I’m grateful to share this music with you.

To my family, thank you for all of it.

My mother is the most thoughtful, generous person I know. You taught me

to welcome uncertainty, and to remain open like a blossoming spring flower. Thank

you for instilling in me a deep love of reading and writing; thank you for knowing me

when I don’t know myself; thank you for your words. They mean everything.

My father is selfless and infinitely kind. I wouldn’t know a thing about music

if it weren’t for you—but more importantly, I wouldn’t care about music if not for

you. You invited me into your complex, vibrant musical landscape, and I’ve been

roaming around inside it ever since. Thank you for your silliness, and for your songs.

Lucian, no one makes me laugh like you. Thank you for making everything

feel easy.

I want to thank my twelfth-grade English teacher, Lisa Baker. It was in your

nonfiction class that I first experimented with the genre, and wrote my first essay

about music—your warmth, support and wise insight encouraged me to keep

writing. This thesis would not exist without you.

Auditioning for Slavei was the best decision I made at Wesleyan—I didn’t

know how much I needed this group when I first stumbled upon it. I am so grateful

for the lovely and special members of Slavei whom I’ve been lucky enough to sing

with, from my sophomore year to my senior year. I’m thankful for all our supras,

which have invited me to be unequivocally vulnerable. And I’m indebted to these

songs, which I’ll never stop singing. Gaumarjos.

I couldn’t have done any of this without my friends across campus—

especially 76 Lawn extended house and Vicious Circles. Abby, Isabel, and Hannah,

I’m so grateful we found each other when we did; I feel so lucky to know and love

you. Our elaborate dinners, liminal-space antics, and bed snuggles made this year

infinitely better.

Abby, my first friend at Wesleyan, my dinner-time vibe doctor, I think we

might be bonded for life. Thank you for your honesty and your fierce loyalty.

Isabel, my unexpected friend, you are the epitome of good. I’ve loved writing

our theses together. Thank you for your infinite wisdom and care.

Hannah, my platonic soulmate, to know you is to love you. You are deeply

kind, and immensely giving. Thank you for your gentleness and your patience—and

for always going splitsies with me.

Cleo and Frankie—one of the first times we hung out, we jammed in your

lowrise for hours and I knew we were going to be fast friends. Forever glad we broke

the separation between Church and State; I love making music with you guys.

I listened to a lot of music while writing these essays: Big Thief, Alice Phoebe

Lou, Slowdive, Cartalk, Japanese Breakfast, Indigo de Souza, Bon Iver, Alex G, Yo

La Tengo, Radiohead, and more—alongside, of course, the songs and artists

mentioned in my essays. These artists helped my thesis take shape. Thank you.

Finally, I want to thank anyone who has ever given me a song—I’m

convinced I know you a little bit better because of it.

Works Cited

Page 33

Rice, Timothy. Music in Bulgaria: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture. Oxford

University Press, 2003, pp. 31-32.

Page 36

Willson, Catherine. The Mystery of ‘The Mystery of Bulgarian Voices.’ 2017. Wesleyan

University, BA thesis, pp.18-19.

Kirilov, Kalin S. Bulgarian Harmony: In Village, Wedding, and Choral Music of the Last

Century. Routledge, 2015, pp. 13-16.

Page 40

Lord, Albert. Epic Singers and Oral Traditions. Cornell University Press, 1991.

Page 58

Himes, Geoffrey. Born in the U.S.A. New York, Continuum, 2005, p. 4.

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Ball, Malcolm. “Biography of Olivier Messiaen.” Oliviermessiaen.org,

https://www.oliviermessiaen.org/biography.

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