UVA Music Department presents "A WondaLand Nightmare: Antebellum's Score and AfroPessimissm"

The Black Lives Matter film genre-scripted and/or directed by Black film and video creators who overtly engage with the Black Lives Matter Movement, which protests shootings of unarmed African Americans-is the cultural engagement of #BLM. This genre began near the coining of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter and as protests grew during the Covid-19 pandemic. Filmmakers confronted police brutality and other racial issues. #BLM films, novels, music, and cultural expressions intersect with both Afrofuturism and Afropessimism. The film Antebellum (2020), directed by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, is a #BLM film, in this case Afro-pessimism. Though it, like #BLM, engages the struggle and protest against both overt and systemic racism, its plot twist turns of the racial fantasy of contemporary slavery as theme park.

Brothers Nate "Rocket" Wonder and Roman GianArthur, part of Janelle Monae's (the lead) Wondaland Arts Collective, composed a haunting post-modern film score that mashes up African-derived ostinato, timbral musical minimalist, timbral, and classic electronic music techniques to create a film score that effectively works with the script and art direction both to create the sense of displacement, confusion, the psychological terror of the characters onscreen and evoke these feelings in the audience. While vernacular and classical African American music are used as both diegetic and non-diegetic music Antebellum, the score —reflects the aesthetic of Monae and the Wondaland Arts Collective-is the driving force that brings the viewer into the mind of the lead character in a film in which both future and past are present.

SPEAKER BIO:

Gayle Murchison is Associate Professor of Music at the College of William & Mary. Her most recent publications include book chapters on Nadia Boulanger in the US, music in Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Woman, and Mary Lou Williams's Girl Stars. She is the author of The American Musical Stravinsky: The Style and Aesthetic of Copland's New American Music, the Early Works, 1921-1938 (The University of Michigan Press, 2012).

Prof. Murchison's research interests focus on African American and African diasporic music ranging from Mary Lou Williams, William Grant Still, and the music of social and cultural movements (such as the Harlem Renaissance and Civil Rights Movements, and, the music of Zap Mama and Afro-European studies). She served as editor of Black Music Research Journal2014-2019. She now edits Jazz Perspectives. She was a British Academy Visiting Fellow in 2023/2024.

Prof. Murchison is currently writing a book on Mary Lou Williams in Europe, 1952-1954. She recently presented her work in progress on Mary Lou Williams, "Mary Lou Williams: Jazz, Race, Gender, and Iconography," as a featured American Musicological Society/ Library of Congress Lecture.