KOLLOQUIUM MUSIKTHEORIE / MUSIC THEORY COLLOQUIA
with Claire Fraysse
Sorbonne Université (France)
Kolloquium Musiktheorie / Music Theory Colloquia – Early 2025 Series:
Current Questions in Philosophy of Music, Analysis and Society
In February 1967, Aretha Franklin’s success with her version of “Respect” led the audience to associate this song naturally and permanently with Franklin. But few people remember that “Respect” is in fact a 1965 song, composed by Otis Redding. Covers in popular music are traditionally considered as a minor genre into a minor genre (Plasketes 2016), rooted in a tradition of repetition and redundancy. Nevertheless, covers are the catalysts of aesthetic evolutions in popular music through a specific temporal dynamic of “futur antérieur”: indeed, covers challenge a linear conception of time, thanks to the surging of several pasts in a present (re)creation. An exploration of rock ontology through covers - following on from the works of Gracyk (1996), Zak (2001) and Kania (2006) - will allow us to question the supremacy of the singer-songwriter as the supreme creative authority in popular music, notably through the comparative analysis of Franklin’s and Redding’s versions of “Respect”.
Claire Fraysse is a PhD candidate and lecturer in music and musicology at Sorbonne Université (France) and Université de Liège (Belgium). Her main research focuses on covers in rock music between 1955 and 1979. Her other works address world music and the ontology of rock, but she is also interested in contemporary music and vocal performance. Claire graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris and from the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris in aesthetics and music theory.
The evenings are moderated by Prof. Dr. Jan Philipp Sprick and Roberta Vidic, who both teach in the Music Theory Department at the Hamburg University of Music and Theater.
Free admission
Contact and Zoom sign-up: roberta.vidic@hfmt-hamburg.de
Overview
13 January, 6.00 pm (CET)
20 January, 6.00 pm (CET)
10 February, 6.00 pm (CET)