Late Style, Disability, and the Temporality of Illness in Popular Music
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Singing at Death’s Door: Late Style, Disability, and the Temporality of Illness in Popular Music A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology by Tiffany Naiman 2017 © Copyright by Tiffany Naiman 2017 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Singing at Death’s Door: Late Style, Disability, and the Temporality of Illness in Popular Music by Tiffany Naiman Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology University of California, Los Angeles, 2017 Professor Robert W. Fink, Co-Chair Professor Raymond L. Knapp, Co-Chair This dissertation investigates musical expressions of temporal alterities in works created by popular music artists, identifying their aesthetic responses as their bodies become ill, disabled, and they become more aware of mortality. I propose a critical, hermeneutic, and theoretical method drawn from Edward Said’s appropriation of Adorno’s expression “late style” that I have designated ill style, a form of creativity within a temporality of illness. Late style is discernable in works produced, paradigmatically, at the end of one’s career in “old age,” but late style may also be understood as an influence on artistic output at any stage of life if the subject is experiencing untimeliness and a disruption in access to the communal understanding of futurity and time, a possible consequence of factors other than age. I contend that late style, accelerated by illness, disrupts Western cultural attempts at ignoring precarious and finite nature of existence; the resulting expressions of lateness ask audiences to do the same. I offer a way in which to think more critically about what scholars consider late style, how it functions in popular ii music studies and society, and how it intersects with the fields of disability, gender, queer, and critical race studies, and the social sciences.
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