Publications by Maria Murphy
Sonic Circulations, 2018
In 2016, Maria Murphy and Roksana Filipowska set up Listening (to) Cyborgs, a collaborative media... more In 2016, Maria Murphy and Roksana Filipowska set up Listening (to) Cyborgs, a collaborative media archaeology lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Here, Maria Murphy delves into what it means to work at the intersection of theory and practice, and how doing so has informed her research on Laurie Anderson.
In The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Practices of Listening (NYU), Sounding Out! Editor... more In The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Practices of Listening (NYU), Sounding Out! Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Lynn Stoever (SUNY Binghamton) excavates an archive that spans a century of audio-visual materials, performance reviews, and African American literature to present the relationship between the sonics of race and the historical racialization of listening. Stoever engages black performers and writers as theorists of listening to demonstrate how listening can serve as a mode of decolonization. In August, Maria Murphy (University of Pennsylvania) spoke with Stoever about the politics of voicing and listening, sound studies, and how Colin Kaepernick hears the national anthem.
Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions, 2019
Anohni’s 2016 album HOPELESSNESS ruminates on feelings of hopelessness in the wake of climate cha... more Anohni’s 2016 album HOPELESSNESS ruminates on feelings of hopelessness in the wake of climate change, domestic surveillance, and geopolitical instability. This chapter considers Ahonhi’s critiques of power through the “Trojan horse” effect of the album, specifically her use of the language of popular music and positioning herself and listeners as both enactors and objects of violence, desire, and control. Through a close analysis of the songs “4 Degrees” and “Watch Me,” this chapter demonstrates how Anohni mobilizes the political potential of irony and the compelling ethos of the confessional genre to implicate listeners—an inventive approach to communicating politics with revolutionary possibilities.
The last time Joan La Barbara was living in Philly, she was working with a local voice teacher on... more The last time Joan La Barbara was living in Philly, she was working with a local voice teacher on “The Bell Song” aria from Leo Delibe’s Lakmé, a signature coloratura soprano showpiece. Since then, her repertoire and vocal techniques have significantly shifted.The composer, singer, and actor is known for her iconic experimental vocal practices, which she created alongside some of the most celebrated composers in American new music, including John Cage, Robert Ashley, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Larry Austin, Peter Gordon, Alvin Lucier, Steve Reich, and her husband Morton Subotnick. She will return to Philadelphia on September 28th to perform the program “Voice is the Original Instrument” at Annenberg Center Live at 8.00pm. Pre-concert talk at 7.00pm.
The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music and Gender, 2017
In lieu of an abstract, the first paragraph of the paper:
Since uploading a rendition of Wham!’... more In lieu of an abstract, the first paragraph of the paper:
Since uploading a rendition of Wham!’s hit song “Freedom” to YouTube in September 2009, Canadian singer/songwriter Lucas Silveira – lead singer of Toronto-based rock band The Cliks – has regularly posted solo cover performances on the video sharing platform. While cover songs are ubiquitous on YouTube, Silveira’s are extraordinary, chronicling his gender transition and the effects of the hormone testosterone on his voice and body. Silveira began posting covers in response to fan requests; comment sections of his YouTube videos, where a thriving international fan community amassed, quickly became a space in which fans pleaded for Silveira to cover specific songs, artists, or genres. So too did this online forum enable an overtly pedagogical project, as fans asked Silveira specific questions about the administration of testosterone and the effect the hormone has on transmasculine vocal performers. That his archive interested trans singers is not surprising; Silveira’s broad oeuvre of covers—recorded and posted from September 2009 to November 2013—allows us to listen closely to otherwise ephemeral sonic markers of gender transitions: voice breaks, subtle changes in pitch and timbre, among others. Silveira’s online cover project presents a voice in process.
Teaching Documents by Maria Murphy
Sexual Differences in the Cinema/Gender in the Cinema
Laura Mulvey's pathbreaking article "Visu... more Sexual Differences in the Cinema/Gender in the Cinema
Laura Mulvey's pathbreaking article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" identified how visual representation constructs the concept of woman and determines how "the meaning of woman is sexual difference." How does the medium of cinema conceive of women as "to-be-looked-at"? And how do other cinematic trends define, produce, and shape our understandings of gender and difference more broadly? This class takes up the social and political production of sexual difference and its relationship with feminism. With special attention to sexual difference in relation to sexuality, race, and class, we will examine fundamental and more recent texts in feminist film theory with readings of Hollywood films, independent films, international films, short films, and documentary films. We will critique ideological assumptions that are created, reinforced, and subverted in a variety of films while building skills to analyze cinematic techniques, genres, and forms, including developing technical language to discuss cinematography, film grammar, sound design, mise-en-scène, narrative, etc.
This course explores the ways in which gender manifests differently in a variety of cultural and ... more This course explores the ways in which gender manifests differently in a variety of cultural and national contexts and the impact of globalization on gendered social relationships. Gender indicates the ways in which our social lives are organized around gender binaries-in relation to work, family, sexuality, crime, culture, and nation-state. Globalization indicates the transfer of economic and cultural goods (capital, goods, people, ideas, militaries, cultures, media, diseases, ecologies, and more) between nations and people. Questions we will explore include: What are some of the histories and hierarchies of gender and globalization? What is globalization and how do different children, women, men, transgender and non-binary people experience it differently? How are wages, compensation, and value negotiated in the global labor market? How does immigration affect families? How different are experiences of women in the "Third World" from those of women in the "First World," why, and where do these terms come from? We will explore these issues and others by reading critical scholarship, watching films/documentaries, and engaging in classroom discussion. The course will take an intersectional approach by considering how gender intersects with other social categories such as race, religion, class, sexuality, age, ability, and nationhood in a range of geographic contexts.
This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies wi... more This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies with a focus on the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality mark our bodies, influence our perceptions of self and others, delimit opportunities for groups and individuals, and impact lived experiences. Using an intersectional lens, this course will cover the material and social constructions and productions of sex and gender and the power dynamics that drive and structure gendered social orders. We will aim to strengthen our analyses of what is present/current through historical context and attention to intellectual genealogies. While primarily situated in the U.S. context, the course also asks students to reflect on transnational interconnections, recognizing that the power structures that shape gender, race, and class in the United States do not exist in isolation. This class counts toward the Cultural Diversity in the United States and Society Sector requirements.
What does it mean to have a voice? To raise your voice? To have your voice heard? What do our voi... more What does it mean to have a voice? To raise your voice? To have your voice heard? What do our voices say about us and what do they fail to communicate? How we speak and how our voices are perceived impact our interactions in daily life, our participation in the political sphere, and our capacity to effect change through activism. In conjunction with Communication Within the Curriculum, this course explores the parameters by which voice is defined in the context of music and sound studies, social justice, philosophy, and media and communication studies. We will consider how voice embodies our political constitution through an examination of various operatic and art song repertoires; the vocal practices of artists such as Tanya Tagaq, Anohni, Juliana Huxtable, Laurie Anderson, Sikh Knowledge, and Lucas Silveira; the phenomena of voice-activated devices such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Echo; and the collective voices of movements such as Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock water protectors. No previous musical training required. May be used toward Music minor requirement and counts for Cultural Diversity in the U.S. requirement.
Papers by Maria Murphy
The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music and Gender, 2017
This dissertation analyzes the musical and sonic work of Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono, and Karen Fin... more This dissertation analyzes the musical and sonic work of Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono, and Karen Finley from the 1980s to demonstrate how these artists participated in a mode of aesthetic activism that contributed to knowledge production and organization regarding public health, censorship, pornography, national security, and reproductive technologies. In particular, I consider biopolitical tensions in New York City during this period concerning the social stratification of particular bodies defined by the early years of the AIDS epidemic; the practices and systems of new communication technologies, such as voice processing techniques in electronic music performance; the censorship and classification of obscene and pornographic music as determined by the Parents Music Resource Center under Ronald Reagan's Presidential Taskforce on the Arts and Humanities; and the categorization of personhood in the wake of new assisted reproductive technologies. I argue that Anderson, Ono, and Finley's performance art and multimedia repertoire address intersections of social and viral contagion, new technologies, and political conservatism at both the national level in the United States and the municipal level in New York City. I analyze the nature of these artists' interventions into the social field and consider what is at stake politically in musicking's participating in broader logics of immunity and technology. viii
Uploads
Publications by Maria Murphy
Since uploading a rendition of Wham!’s hit song “Freedom” to YouTube in September 2009, Canadian singer/songwriter Lucas Silveira – lead singer of Toronto-based rock band The Cliks – has regularly posted solo cover performances on the video sharing platform. While cover songs are ubiquitous on YouTube, Silveira’s are extraordinary, chronicling his gender transition and the effects of the hormone testosterone on his voice and body. Silveira began posting covers in response to fan requests; comment sections of his YouTube videos, where a thriving international fan community amassed, quickly became a space in which fans pleaded for Silveira to cover specific songs, artists, or genres. So too did this online forum enable an overtly pedagogical project, as fans asked Silveira specific questions about the administration of testosterone and the effect the hormone has on transmasculine vocal performers. That his archive interested trans singers is not surprising; Silveira’s broad oeuvre of covers—recorded and posted from September 2009 to November 2013—allows us to listen closely to otherwise ephemeral sonic markers of gender transitions: voice breaks, subtle changes in pitch and timbre, among others. Silveira’s online cover project presents a voice in process.
Teaching Documents by Maria Murphy
Laura Mulvey's pathbreaking article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" identified how visual representation constructs the concept of woman and determines how "the meaning of woman is sexual difference." How does the medium of cinema conceive of women as "to-be-looked-at"? And how do other cinematic trends define, produce, and shape our understandings of gender and difference more broadly? This class takes up the social and political production of sexual difference and its relationship with feminism. With special attention to sexual difference in relation to sexuality, race, and class, we will examine fundamental and more recent texts in feminist film theory with readings of Hollywood films, independent films, international films, short films, and documentary films. We will critique ideological assumptions that are created, reinforced, and subverted in a variety of films while building skills to analyze cinematic techniques, genres, and forms, including developing technical language to discuss cinematography, film grammar, sound design, mise-en-scène, narrative, etc.
Papers by Maria Murphy
Since uploading a rendition of Wham!’s hit song “Freedom” to YouTube in September 2009, Canadian singer/songwriter Lucas Silveira – lead singer of Toronto-based rock band The Cliks – has regularly posted solo cover performances on the video sharing platform. While cover songs are ubiquitous on YouTube, Silveira’s are extraordinary, chronicling his gender transition and the effects of the hormone testosterone on his voice and body. Silveira began posting covers in response to fan requests; comment sections of his YouTube videos, where a thriving international fan community amassed, quickly became a space in which fans pleaded for Silveira to cover specific songs, artists, or genres. So too did this online forum enable an overtly pedagogical project, as fans asked Silveira specific questions about the administration of testosterone and the effect the hormone has on transmasculine vocal performers. That his archive interested trans singers is not surprising; Silveira’s broad oeuvre of covers—recorded and posted from September 2009 to November 2013—allows us to listen closely to otherwise ephemeral sonic markers of gender transitions: voice breaks, subtle changes in pitch and timbre, among others. Silveira’s online cover project presents a voice in process.
Laura Mulvey's pathbreaking article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" identified how visual representation constructs the concept of woman and determines how "the meaning of woman is sexual difference." How does the medium of cinema conceive of women as "to-be-looked-at"? And how do other cinematic trends define, produce, and shape our understandings of gender and difference more broadly? This class takes up the social and political production of sexual difference and its relationship with feminism. With special attention to sexual difference in relation to sexuality, race, and class, we will examine fundamental and more recent texts in feminist film theory with readings of Hollywood films, independent films, international films, short films, and documentary films. We will critique ideological assumptions that are created, reinforced, and subverted in a variety of films while building skills to analyze cinematic techniques, genres, and forms, including developing technical language to discuss cinematography, film grammar, sound design, mise-en-scène, narrative, etc.