Baljinder S Sekhon, Thesis Supervisor Charles Dowell Youmans, Thesis Honors Advisor
Keywords:
Music feminism abortion reproductive rights
Abstract:
A Correspondence with Mrs. Sacks is a work for soprano, piano, and fixed media playback. This piece is a non-linear narrative work that centers around two characters; Alice, a woman in her 20s in the 2020s, and Mrs. Sacks, a woman in her 20s from the 1920s. Alice and Mrs. Sacks interact through letters, which are heard in the fixed media (Mrs. Sacks) and performed live by a vocalist (Alice). The text of the work is a fictionalized interaction that takes inspiration from the real woman, Mrs. Sacks, whose complicated account of pregnancy was recorded in Margaret Sanger’s essay, My Fight for Birth Control. This piece uses quotations and almost exclusively derives musical content from three songs with themes of women’s rights from the early 1900s: I’ll be no submissive wife, She’s good enough to be your baby’s mother and she’s good enough to vote with you, and You’d better be nice to them now.