#JoniBlueAt50
Speakers
Below are the invited speakers for Joni Mitchell's Blue at 50
virtual conference. Paper titles coming soon.
Ann Powers
Critic and Correspondent, NPR Music
Moderator: Back to the Garden: Reflections on Joni Mitchell’s Life and Art
Ann Powers, one of the United States' top music critics, moderates a discussion with two authors who interviewed Joni Mitchell herself. Malka Marom and Daniel Levitin share their stories, experiences, and insight into the complex musical world of Joni Mitchell.
Malka Marom
Author, In Her Own Words: Conversations with Joni Mitchell
Speaker: Back to the Garden: Reflections on Joni Mitchell’s Life and Art
Ann Powers, one of the United States' top music critics, moderates a discussion with two authors who interviewed Joni Mitchell herself. Malka Marom and Daniel Levitin share their stories, experiences, and insight into the complex musical world of Joni Mitchell.
Daniel Levitin
Dean, College of Arts and Humanities - Minerva Schools at KGI
Speaker: Back to the Garden: Reflections on Joni Mitchell’s Life and Art
Ann Powers, one of the United States' top music critics, moderates a discussion with two authors who interviewed Joni Mitchell herself. Malka Marom and Daniel Levitin share their stories, experiences, and insight into the complex musical world of Joni Mitchell.
Lloyd Whitesell
Professor, McGill University
Dissolves and Jump Cuts in Joni Mitchell's Poetry
I plan to explore one corner of Mitchell’s poetic technique by focusing on two special effects that figure in a significant number of songs. One stratagem involves an unprepared leap between disjunct settings or observations: “And I filled it full of silver / And I left the fingers counting */* And the sky goes on forever” (“Nathan La Franeer”). The other involves a passage of free association in which the relation between metaphorical referents becomes unstable: “A diamond dog / Carrying a cup and a cane / Looking through a double glass” (“The Hissing of Summer Lawns”). Each stratagem in its own way disrupts a normative linear discourse: one through a surprising discontinuity, the other through a disorienting hyper-substitution.
A survey of key poetic moments will demonstrate the sophistication of Mitchell’s use of each technique and the range of lyrical and psychological effects she achieves. A chronological view will consider how they relate to her evolving aesthetics: the jump cut already figures on the first album, while the dissolve makes an entrance with the song “Blue” and climaxes in songs of the mid-1970s.
Nicole Biamonte
Professor, McGill University
Wide Harmony: Joni Mitchell’s Slash-Chord Piano Voicings
In this paper I examine the expanded syntax of harmonic functions expressed via slash chords in the solo piano music from Joni Mitchell’s early folk-rock period, comprising her first five albums (1968-72), conceived and recorded primarily as a solo artist. Recent scholarship explores the compositional affordances of Mitchell’s nonstandard guitar tunings, which accommodate her polio-weakened left hand but also create idiosyncratic chord voicings that have become a signature element of her songwriting style. Similar analytical attention has not been paid to her piano voicings, which are typically more consonant than her guitar voicings but likewise accommodate her less-agile left hand, in this case through pedal points and “slash chords”: mid-register close-position triadic harmonies with nonchord tones in the bass. Mitchell’s right-hand and left-hand piano parts are registrally distinct and often harmonically distinct, in a mildly “divorced” or stratified texture featuring slash chords. Some of these are created through prolongational structures such as passing and neighboring chord progressions, but others represent traditional harmonic functions through extended structures more typical of jazz, which Mitchell has described as “wide harmony.” I demonstrate these alternative realizations of conventional harmonic functions through analyses of selected piano songs from her early period.
