Musciology Lecture by Marc Hannaford

Musciology Lecture by Marc Hannaford

Black Fire, Judgment, and Points of Departure: Creative Practice and Music Theory in Andrew Hill’s Archive

Thursday, Oct. 12, 2023

4 p.m.

First floor conference room, Contemporary Arts Center

Iconoclastic jazz pianist and composer Andrew Hill (1931–2007) created a body of recorded work that reflects the depth and breadth of Black American music. From his breakout small-group recordings for Blue Note in the 1960s such as Point of Departure and Lift Every Voice, to his large-ensemble modular compositions of the 2000s, documented on A Beautiful Day, Hill’s music reflects a personal intertwinement of tradition and innovation, as well as creative freedom and compositional craft. Hill was usually opaque about his creative process in interviews with journalists, but his pedagogical work in universities on both coasts of the United States demonstrates that he was a dedicated pedagogue with clear ideas about musical structure.

This talk explores materials from Hill’s archive to discuss his personal music theory and how it may have informed his creative practice. I draw on unpublished book fragments, scores, and sketches to argue that Hill developed and deployed music theory as a productive part of his creative and pedagogical work. This perspective also repositions music theory as a generative component of Black creative music making. Thought in these terms, music theoretical abstraction opens up new creative possibilities, interfacing with music in terms of embodiment, listening, and collaboration, as well as offering broader resonances on social and political planes.

Marc Hannaford (he/him) is a music theorist teaching at the University of Michigan whose interests lie at the intersection of jazz and improvisation, identity (especially race, gender, and disability), performance, and embodiment. He completed his PhD at Columbia University in 2019 with a dissertation on Muhal Richard Abrams, pianist, composer, and cofounder of the Association for the Advancement for Creative Musicians (AACM). His publications appear in Music Theory Online, Women & Music, and Sound American, and the Society for Music Theory’s Jazz Interest Group awarded him the 2019 Steve Larson Award for his paper, “Affordances and Free Improvisation: An Analytical Framework.” As a committed pedagogue, Marc helps students develop personal engagements with music via the critical exploration of manifold approaches: theoretical, analytical, historical, and creative. He is also an improvising pianist, composer, and electronic musician who has performed and/or recorded with Tim Berne, Ingrid Laubrock, Tom Rainey, Tony Malaby, and William Parker