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On the record: Sessions put music on an academic track

03/13/04

Leila Atassi
Plain Dealer Reporter


If pop music legend Prince had known that one day the academic music community would be critically examining the intersection of sexuality and religiosity in his music, he might have forgone the buttless pants he once wore at the MTV Music Awards. Or perhaps, as a young graduate student suggested in an excerpt from his dissertation, that was all part of his master plan.

UCLA student Griffin Wood worth's presentation, "Little Red Corvette": Make-Out Mobile or Celestial Chariot? Religious Imagery and Sexual Perversity in the Music of Prince, was standing room only at this year's conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections and the Society for American Music.


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The conference, held Wednesday through today at the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel, marked the first time the highly academic SAM joined ARSC - an organization of record collectors, archivists and dealers - for an exchange of cultural criticism and practical discussion.

Woodworth's presentation drew members from both organizations, including those who claim musicology as their area of expertise and others who simply claim Prince as a part of their collection.

"Prince has moved away from overt gender transgression," Woodworth told his audience. He suggests that the religious subtexts in Prince's music and its structure closely parallel gospel music.

Academic analyses pervaded a majority of the conference's sessions, which dealt with topics from music downloading and file swapping to musical influences in Cleveland.

In the session "Music and Teen Girls," academics explored the role of music in teen romantic comedies and coming-of-age films. During movie clips illustrating the female experience of records as an exploration of self, the primarily male audience of record collectors laughed empathetically at scenes depicting col lectors' almost neurotic protectiveness of their collections.

Robynn Stilwell, assistant professor of music at Georgetown University, expounded on why men and women collect records and how those differences are represented in film.

"Men are more invested in the actual object," she said. "For them it's much more of an acquisition. For women, it's more about the music itself and how that contributes to the creation of memories and formation of identity."

The cross-pollination of ideas was an opportunity to cover the greatest possible territory of American music, said Mary Davis, professor of music at Case Western Reserve University. "It's a natural fit, " she said. "While the ARSC members are talking about records as artifacts . . . SAM members are presenting on music's role in communication and culture. We're bringing the two sides of the music story together."

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

latassi@plaind.com




© 2004 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission.