Musicology/Ethnomusicology Colloquium: Guest Speaker Dr. Naomi Graber

Forbidden Voodoo: Wartime Women and Cross-racial Encounters in I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

The words “classic horror” conjure images of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney Jr.’s Old World monsters, and perhaps the sounds of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, or Franz Waxman’s Wagnerian score for The Bride of Frankenstein. But during World War II, the Val Lewton Unit at RKO produced a series of psychological horror films set in the present that spoke to the fears of white women on the home front. Their modern settings and psychologically-driven thrills required a wider variety of musical materials than the films of the previous decade. Roy Webb and Haitian folklorist Leroy Antoine’s score for I Walked with a Zombie (1943) is emblematic. The film dramatizes the anxieties of white women medical workers facing twin challenges: the limits of western medicine, and a new proximity to black women in the workplace. In the film, music renders the boundaries of the white and black worlds of the setting—a fictionalized version of Haiti—porous. This musical boundary-crossing highlights the protagonist’s—a nurse—growing awareness of racial injustice, just as many white women became aware of similar tensions in the United States. At the same time, the invasion of blackness into the musical and medical worlds of the film speaks to women’s ambivalence about both western medicine and its ‘exotic’ alternatives. The music reveals shifts in horror scoring as the genre evolved to address a female audience, and a much about the anxieties of white women during World War II.

Dr. Naomi Graber Naomi Graber (associate professor) joined the faculty of UGA in 2013. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill She is the recipient of the Rhonda A. and Robert Hillel Silver Award from the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, the Virgil Thomson Fellowship from the Society for American Music, as well as fellowships to study at the Library of Congress, the Arnold Schönberg-Centre in Vienna, and the Kurt Weill Foundation. Her research centers on twentieth century American music, especially Broadway and film of the 1930s and 1940s. Her first book, Kurt Weill’s America was published by Oxford University Press in 2021, and she co-edited The Works of Kurt Weill: Transformations and Transfigurations in 20th Century Music, published by Brepols in 2023. Currently, she is co-editor of Studies in Musical Theatre, and her publications have appeared in American Music, The Journal for the Society of American Music, Journal of Musicological Research, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image and Studies in Musical Theatre, and she teaches classes on American Popular Music, Music in the United States, Film Music, and Music after 1750.