Rufus Wainwright - Katherine Williams
Family
Rufus Wainwright - Katherine Williams
Katherine Williams [+]
University of Bristol
Dr Katherine Williams is Lecturer in Music at Plymouth University. Prior to her appointment in 2014, she lectured at Leeds College of Music and Cardiff University, and taught on various modules at the University of Bristol. Throughout her musicological study (BMus King's College London, MA and PhD University of Nottingham), Katherine maintained an active profile as a saxophonist, performing and teaching in the idioms of classical, jazz and new music. Katherine's research has been published by Jazz Perspectives, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, and Jazz Research Journal (forthcoming 2014). Her first monograph is in production with Equinox Press, and she is co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter (forthcoming 2016), and the Singer-Songwriter Handbook (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).
Description
Most of Rufus Wainwright’s songs contain an autobiographical element. When his subject is his family, he continues a long-established tradition. His father, folk singer Loudon Wainwright III and mother Kate McGarrigle, as well as sister Martha Wainwright have all expressed their relationships publicly through song—and in this chapter, I analyse songs that explain these relationships from Rufus’s perspective. Case studies include ‘Beauty Mark’, ‘Little Sister’, ‘Dinner At Eight’, and ‘Want’. More details about Rufus Wainwright can be found at Williams’ recent blogpost on Thinking About Music, available here .