Torch songs are standards—musical forms and formulas that recount the pain and suffering of unrequited love. But torch songs are also sites—interpretive spaces waiting to be filled by a performance. As such, torch singing is at once a product and producer of action—a site for concerted connection, deliberation, and contention. The resistive possibilities of a song of unrequited love are generated in the singing, in how a performance of a standard creates new spaces, new movements, and new meanings.
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