Nina Simone channels anger on her 1964 live album Nina Simone in Concert<\/em> by incorporating various intense, isolating vocal timbres and the classically informed piano conventions of periodicity, harmony and melody as musical resistance against her white audience\u2019s expectations of black women musicianship during the Civil Rights movement.\u00a0<\/strong> When discussing an album as crucial to the Civil Rights movement as In Concert<\/em>, it can be easy to focus on Nina Simone\u2019s marginalized position as African-American, and only analyze her music through this racial activist lens.\u00a0 This perspective, although limited in scope, invites us to understand Simone\u2019s violent, politically charged lyrics always in context with the history of the Civil Rights movement and the history of her career itself, as In Concert <\/em>marks a turning point in the subject matter of her songs and a renewal of the overall purpose for her songwriting.\u00a0 However, this method of analysis neglects how Nina Simone, the vocalist and<\/em> instrumentalist, resisted categorization from the primarily white patriarchal music industry which attempted to define her as simply a \u201cjazz singer.\u201d Focusing on a musical analysis of two of the seven songs from this live album, I will attempt to prove how the performance of Simone\u2019s songs themselves operate as a form of musical resistance against not only the extreme oppression surrounding Nina Simone during the 1960\u2019s, but also against the music industry that strove toward unfairly categorizing her as simply a \u201cjazz singer.\u201d<\/p>\n This musical resistance takes two principal forms.\u00a0 Focusing specifically on the dynamics, timbre and pitch of \u201cPirate Jenny\u201d and \u201cMississippi Goddam,\u201d I will first discuss the various vocal techniques Nina Simone employs as a method of subverting her audience\u2019s expectations.\u00a0 Her anger, from both the political implications of the lyrics and her own frustration against the oppression she faces as a black woman in the music industry, seeps into her voice on these songs in order to isolate and scorn her audience as opposed to offering a place of familiarity and refuge.\u00a0 Simone draws her audience into her story, whether they want to hear it or not.\u00a0 Overall, the unpredictable extremities of Nina Simone\u2019s vocal range, her cracking shouts then suddenly raspy and whispering timbres, gives her the agency to command the reactions of her audience, in this case her primarily white audience at Carnegie Hall.<\/p>\n Along with manipulating her voice to work against the expectations of her audience, Nina Simone also incorporates classical piano techniques into her songs such as \u201cPirate Jenny\u201d and \u201cMississippi Goddam\u201d as a way to resist musical categorization.\u00a0 Simone\u2019s influences and training in a genre dominated by white men, coupled with her performance in Carnegie Hall, complicates her status as a jazz singer because Carnegie is typically considered a revered accolade for classical instrumentalists and composers.\u00a0 By analyzing Simone\u2019s music in regard to classical conventions such as periodicity, harmony, and melody, I argue that Simone manipulates these elements to aid in the musical expression of anger pointed at her listeners and, in turn, to induce fear from those listeners.\u00a0 In other words, she is \u201cclassicalizing\u201d jazz by manipulating classical conventions to stir negative and fearful emotions from her primarily white audience at Carnegie Hall.<\/p>\n In later pages, I will discuss how her audience responded to her live performance in Carnegie Hall, and their critical reactions to her new politicized sound in context with the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.\u00a0 I attempt to answer the question of how exactly the music industry wished to categorize her sound and why, even today, the common perception of her is as a \u201cjazz singer\u201d or even retrospectively as a \u201cCivil Rights singer\u201d.<\/p>\n (Cover Photo of this page: This is an image of Nina Simone in 1964.\u00a0 The picture shows her presence during the performances at Carnegie Hall in 1964.\u00a0 Note her stoic, confident expression.\u00a0 She demands to be more than what others wanted her to be: simply a “jazz singer,” overlooking her pleas to also be recognized for her classically trained piano skill)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Overview and Introduction to my Argument Nina Simone channels anger on her 1964 live album Nina Simone in Concert by incorporating various intense, isolating vocal…<\/p>\n