Thursday, April 3rd at 5pm
Lewis Music Library, MIT
Light reception to follow
But Does It Still Smell Like Teen Spirit?: Sound, Identity, Expectation, and the Dialogue of the Cover Song
In this talk, music analyst, ethnomusicologist, and MIT Associate Professor of Music Leslie A. Tilley presents her work-in-progress on the analysis of cover songs. Examining the genres, styles, identities, and contexts of Nirvana’s grunge hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and two important covers by women artists—the bare acoustic piano cover by alternative confessional singer-songwriter Tori Amos and the epic orchestral version by Malia J and Think Up Anger, featured in Marvel's 2021 blockbuster movie Black Widow—Tilley explores the spaces that popular music recordings leave open for radical reimaginings, the diverse and contradictory responses such invitations evoke in both artists and listeners, and the multiple analytical lenses needed unpack these complex musical and social dialogues.
About the Speaker
Leslie A. Tilley is an Associate Professor of Music at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a music analyst and ethnomusicologist with research interests in musical transformation and alternative approaches to music theory, analysis, and pedagogy. Her book Making it up Together: The Art of Collective Improvisation in Balinese Music and Beyond (University of Chicago Press, 2019) presents close analyses of the Balinese improvised forms reyong norot and kendang arja while offering broad-reaching analytical frameworks for examining improvisation and collective creativity across genres and cultures. The book won the prestigious Emerging Scholar Book Award from the Society for Music Theory in 2022. Tilley's current work expands the purview of her forays into musical transformation, proposing analytical models for a comparative and multi-modal approach to the analysis of cover songs.
About the Music Forum Series
The MIT Music & Theater Arts Music Forum is a series of public presentations by music scholars from inside and outside of MIT. Hosted in the Lewis Music Library and presented in partnership with MIT Libraries, the MTA Music Forum Series gives the MIT Community an opportunity to engage with leading voices in every field of music scholarship. Past presenters include John Harbison, Julia Wolfe, Terry Riley, Don Byron, and others.
