'Ancestral Crossfades: Affective Articulation in Beyoncé’s RENAISSANCE'
Beyoncé’s RENAISSANCE (2022) is an album overflowing with musico-affective collisions and fluidities. As her listeners, we career through sonic worlds influenced by Black (and) queer musical histories, encountering the ebullient, inexorable urgency of the dancefloor at every turn. In this talk, I combine a musicological interest in the composition of Beyoncé’s sonic aesthetic with philosophical exploration of the album’s foregrounding of affective articulation. I focus in detail on junctures between tracks and sections, examining the influence of early disco practices on moments of ‘seamless mixing’, beat-matching, and tempo-mapping, as well as considering how the narrative logics of such moments imbricate with the themes of the record. In this way, I critically investigate how RENAISSANCE’s aesthetic and structural gestures echo the sonic and affective flows and overflows of Beyoncé’s (self-professed) musical ancestries. I do so partly by adopting Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta’s (2023) notion of liquidarity as a descriptor of the ‘fluid togetherness’ of the dancefloor, asking how—and why—we might hear dance music’s embodied socialities in the album’s form, as well as why we might critique its aesthetic intentions.
Date: 26 November 2024, 17:15 (Tuesday, 7th week, Michaelmas 2024)
Venue: Faculty of Music, St Aldate's OX1 1DB
Venue Details: Denis Arnold Hall
Speaker: Dr Jacob Kingsbury Downs (University of Oxford)
Organising department: Faculty of Music
Organisers: Betty Yan (Faculty of Music), Jessica Edgar (Faculty of Music)
Organiser contact email address: events@music.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Graduate Research Colloquium
Booking required?: Not required
Booking url: https://www.music.ox.ac.uk/event/24-11-26-graduate-research-colloquia
Cost: Free
Audience: Public
Editor: Laura Howorth