Department of Music Lecture: Graduate Student Lectures
Jessica Ray King, PhD Candidate in Musicology
Title
Doctoring Western Staff Notation & Doctoring Beethoven: Possibilities and Pitfalls in Transcribing Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s Aesthetics in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Concerto for Violin in D Major, op. 61: 1, Allegro ma non troppo
Abstract
Can a single notation system capture every auditory and physical component of all music? I ask this, reflecting on the growing suspicion and vitriol towards western staff notation. Despite its shortcomings, western staff notation is quite adept at notating pitch, meter, and rhythm for the music it was developed for, particularly when employed in prescriptive uses of music-writing. Admittedly, however, the western staff is not able to capture every aspect of a composer’s intention, let alone every aspect of a performer’s actual performance. For descriptive transcription, western staff notation’s shortcomings become more apparent for transcribers seeking to report how a specific performance actually did sound.
The purpose of this project was twofold. First, to identify the potentials and pitfalls of doctoring the western staff to serve descriptive transcription practice. Second, to elucidate controversial violin soloist Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s performance aesthetics and how they are disrupting expectations of Western classical music’s performance, performers, and audiences. To facilitate these inquiries I transcribed Kopatchinskaja’s 2012 performance of the first movement of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major Op. 61 with the Berliner Staatskapelle, printed side-by-side against Joachim’s 1905 edition as well as Kopatchinskaja’s own cadenza (inspired by Beethoven’s little-known cadenza for the piano arrangement of the concerto, featuring timpani.) Experimental doctoring includes rubato arrows, borrowed gospel nomenclature from Andrew Legg, color changes to highlight improvised passages, and brief in-score text descriptions when necessary.
The transcriptions serve as useful data-rich analytical tools, offering insight into the evolution of violin performance and pedagogy, from Paganini’s bravura virtuosity, to Joachim’s Werktreue sympathies, to Kopatchinskaja’s post-millennial artistry. Despite the seeming shortcomings of doctored Western staff notation, from this project, it is clear that with the options available to us as scholars, performers, and music fans, the current solution requires such a multifarious approach. Such approaches concurrently refer to and utilize Western staff transcription, recordings, mechanical transcriptions, our own knowledge, and perhaps most importantly, our own musical practice.
Biography
Jessica Ray King is an artist-scholar of diverse tastes and talents. Her research focuses on women in Western classical music and heavy metal; recent projects explore the aesthetics of violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and bimbocore metal artist Scene Queen. Apart from her PhD studies at WashU, she serves as an Adjunct Instructor of Music History at University of Missouri St. Louis and Violin and Viola at Webster University Community Music School while maintaining an active performing schedule.
Recent performance highlights include her participation as a festival artist in the summers of 2023-25 at I Suoni di Sillene Festival Musical in Chianciano Terme and Casciana Terme, Italy and performing Deniz Çağlarcan’s prizewinning work “Void for Viola and Fixed Electronics” at Indiana State University’s Contemporary Music Festival (2024). Further accolades include making the semi-finals of WashU’s 2024 Dean’s Award for Graduate Research Excellence, a joint lecture-recital with Dr. Fei Tong, “Hopeful Harmony: Celebrating China’s Ethno-Cultural Diversity through Music,” at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. (2024), and presenting “I’m About to Pop Your Music Bubble: Scene Queen’s Hyper-Feminine Bimbocore Metal Theatrics and Aesthetics v. Metal’s Misogyny,” at IAPSM-US (2025).
King earned her M.M. in Viola Performance as renowned viola pedagogue David Holland's graduate assistant at Central Michigan University and earned her B.A. in Music as a student of Christine Rutledge and B.A. in English with Honors from the University of Iowa. Outside of music she enjoys cooking, traveling, swimming, hiking, dramatic poetry reading, excessive coffee drinking, and competing in dog agility with her Border Collie, Ronan Ginsburg Dissents.
Christina Smiley, PhD Candidate in Musicology
Title
Reconceiving “Renaissance Happenings”: Blurred Boundaries and the Ethos of R. Nathaniel Dett’s The Ordering of Moses (1932)
Abstract
Composer and educator R. Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943) saw spirituals as a link to the African past, reflective of enslaved people’s resistance and coping. In the spirit of Sankofa, and as a medium for racial uplift, he aimed to uphold the significance of Black sacred music while ridding it of the “caricature and defilement” (Du Bois 1903). This imperative is evident in his 1932 work, The Ordering of Moses which combines the Biblical Exodus with Negro folktales and infuses the spiritual “Go Down, Moses” with a 20th century neo-romantic style. Observing this melding of sacred and secular (scripture and folklore), I hope to trace a Black theology that reconciles religion and the Black social consciousness of the period. It is beneficial to (re)consider this relationship, as the Church served as a foundational site of Black gathering and education in New Negro culture. This argument counters claims that the Harlem Renaissance was a staunchly secularist movement (Levering Lewis 1994), a position negligent of Black participation within, not only the “Black Church,” but also Catholic, Presbyterian, and Anglican churches.
Dett’s multiple mentions and “Men of the Month” feature in The Crisis magazine become evidence of the (then) blurred boundaries we have more steadfastly and retrospectively upheld. His scholarly and musical works are demonstrative of the complex and diverse spectrum of Black social, political, and religious thought during the period. Moreover, his music proposes an additional “soundtrack” for the movement adjacent to jazz, ragtime, and the blues. In conversation with scholars such as Jon M. Spencer, Edward Said, and Dett himself, this paper focuses on the ethos and reception of The Ordering of Moses (1932). To view this composition as representative of compliant, double consciousness and respectability politics is to neglect the role of sacred music in Dett’s Black nationalistic project. It also ignores the ways in which Dett pushes back on the limits of Black authenticity. Consciously abandoning claims of assimilation, I position the work’s sonic, thematic, and lyrical qualities as disruptions of Western hegemony and evidence of the interrelations between sacred music, theology, and Black-conscious thought in the Harlem Renaissance milieu.
Biography
Christina Smiley is a 4th-year PhD student in musicology with an American Culture Studies Certificate at Washington University in St. Louis. She is a 2024-25 CRE2 Race & Ethnicity Scholar, a 2025 Washington University Dean’s Award for Research Excellence Semi-Finalist, and she was awarded the American Musicological Society’s Howard Mayer Brown fellowship for 2025-26. At WashU, Christina has served as planning committee co-chair for Washington University’s Centenary Julia Perry Symposium in 2024, Mellon Mays graduate student mentor from 2022-2024, and she has presented on the 2025 Engaging the Local Public Humanities Colloquium and Workshop. Christina is interested in the intersections of race, class, gender, theology, literature, and politics in African American sacred music during the 20th century. More specifically, her emerging scholarship observes the melding of the sacred and secular in non-idiomatic sacred choral works by Black composers, considering the traces of radical Black resistance and concurrent Black socio-political paradigms. Her research interests also include African American participation in and performance of European classical music, more broadly, as well as global music history and intercultural exchange, and esotericism and transcendence in gospel, jazz, and soul genres. Prior to attending WashU, she studied music and communication studies, obtaining her associate and bachelor’s degrees at Indian River State College and the University of Miami, respectively. Apart from her scholarly pursuits, Christina is an active musician, performing in classical, gospel, jazz, and musical theatre arenas. Most recently she was a featured vocalist in “Music as the Message,” a community-building concert series co-organized by the Opera Theatre of St. Louis and Metropolitan Opera soprano, Adrienne Danrich.
Jacob P. Cupps, PhD Candidate in Music Theory
Title
Deconstructing Jazz Rap: Footwork, Formal Process, and Sampling in RP Boo & Armand Hammer’s “Blood Running High” (2023)
Abstract
When analyzing the sampling techniques in the jazz rap movement, Justin Williams (2013) describes “jazz codes” as a type of genre synecdoche (Tagg 1999), where a sample from a jazz recording imports the institutional prestige associated with the jazz tradition into the hip-hop song in which it is placed. This paper examines a case of jazz sampling in hip-hop where the inverse is true. On the underground hip-hop duo Armand Hammer and the Chicago-based producer RP Boo’s “Blood Running High” (2023), I argue that the samples from Sun Ra’s “Meteor Shower” [1970](2014) and “Images” (1973) are not intended to reference the jazz tradition despite their inclusion on a collaborative tribute album. Instead, I hear the artists reconfiguring them to fit within the sound world of Chicago footwork, a stylistic offshoot from Chicago house. Taking seriously RP Boo’s claim that a footwork track could feature any sample by “slowing it down and just listening” (Host and RP Boo 2016), I show how recurrent production techniques emerge in footwork remixes that sample sources ranging from Akira Ikufube’s Godzilla scores to Sexyy Red’s Tay-Keith produced trap singles. These selections show how sampled elements become footwork tracks when producers combine glitch techniques (Russell 2020) with slow, processual (Schmalfeldt 2011; Garcia 2005) changes to the musical texture. Returning to “Blood Running High,” I suggest that the track might be heard as a deconstruction of – rather than a statement within – the jazz rap subgenre. I therefore conclude that we should understand the song not as the artists’ attempt to “elevate” or legitimize the underground hip-hop or dance music scenes in which they participate through reference to the jazz canon, but instead to, in the words of the late rapper Guru of Gang Starr, “[bring] jazz back to the streets… back where it belongs” (Smith 1994).
Biography
Jacob P. Cupps is a PhD Candidate in Music Theory and Lynn Cooper Harvey fellow in American Cultural Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Their dissertation – tentatively titled Known Unknowns: Musical Practice and Discourses of Undergroundness in Contemporary Hip-Hop – works with hip-hop musicians to analyze the performance and reception of subcultural identity within hip-hop scenes since 2010. Today’s presentation comes from an in-progress dissertation chapter focusing on metaphors and meaning-making gestures artists explore through their use of digital sampling technology.