Kelsey Klotz (Ph.D. Music, ’16) has been awarded this year’s prestigious Charles Seeger Prize from the Society of Ethnomusicology. The purpose of this award is to recognize the most distinguished student paper presented at the Society of Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting and is awarded at each Annual Meeting for the best paper from the previous year’s meeting.
About the paper:
“Sweating Sound: Labor, Intellect, and Race in Miles Davis’s Sound Discourse”
The paper analyzes Miles Davis’s comments about sweat, images of him sweating, and interpretations of his sweat by critics and musicians. I interpret this evidence using theories of sweat proposed by Anthony Braxton and Roland Barthes, who each posit that sweat can be used by critics and audiences as either a sign of primitivism or a sign of intellect—the difference lies in who is sweating. Taken together, Braxton and Barthes’s theories of sweat understand black jazz musicians’ sweat as a sign of physical exertion, or primitivism, and sweat by white actors to be a sign of mental exertion. I argue that Davis complicates this racial binary; Davis articulated his own view of his sweat and his sound as disembodied, reclaiming both as symbols of intellect.
Kelsey Klotz is a lecturer in the American Culture Studies program at Washington University in St. Louis and the Anthropology department at Webster University. Last May, she received her Ph.D. in Musicology from Washington University in St. Louis, where she completed her dissertation, “Racial Ideologies in 1950s Cool Jazz,” under the direction of Pat Burke. Her research concentrates on the cultural construction of cool jazz around narratives of white privilege, focusing particularly on Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, and the Modern Jazz Quartet.
