Musicology - Events

MUY Symposium Speakers Spring 2013

7 February 2013

Neal Zaslaw, Cornell University

"Boccherini's Symphonies: Generic and Historiographical Puzzles"

6 March 2013, 4:30 p.m., Hatch Recital Hall

The Glenn Watkins Lecture: Leon Botstein, Bard College

“The Future of Performance and Concert Life in Historical Perspective”

For more information, please go to the press release.

21 March 2013, 5:00 p.m., Welles Brown Room in Rush Rhees Library

Deane Root, University of Pittsburgh

"Susan B. Anthony and the Sonic World"

Sponsored by the Humanities Project and the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies

28 March 2013, **5:00 p.m.,** ESM 404

The John Cage Lecture Series: Dora Hanninen, University of Maryland

"Asking Questions / Making Music"

Co-sponsored with the departments of Music Theory and Composition

4 April 2013

James Currie, University of Buffalo

"If I Only Had a Heart: Life in Comic Modernity"

The study of music, like much culturally orientated research within the so-called postmodern academy, is still strongly driven by a logic of expression.  We tend to script our objects of study as if their resulting form were the expression of some content (cultural, political, social, historical, and so forth).  This content is nearly always understood as pre-existing the musical object, as being a ground upon which music, if we are acting responsibly, must be placed.  Failing to do so can open one up to a variety of accusations: of being a formalist, a modernist, even a supporter of totalitarian politics!

But if musicological grounding techniques appear self-evident, sensible, and ethical to us, they are also potentially contradictory, particularly if we are dealing with music in modernity.  For in the accelerated speed and endless transformations of capitalist modernity, as Marx said, “all that is solid melts into air,” and that includes the ground too.  Since this is even more the case now, we might therefore ask whether our musicological acts of grounding do not also help to disavow the ever-increasing traumatic instabilities of world.  If, as it has been written, one should build one’s home on solid ground, where on earth are we meant to live now?

This paper, part of the initial stages of a larger book project entitled “On Sonic Gravity,” seeks to make inroads into this question by turning to a reconsideration of comedy within modernity.  In imitation of the pacing of comedy itself, it ranges rapidly through a wide range of examples, including The Communist Manifesto, Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Poulenc’s Les mamelles de Tiresias, and The Wizard of Oz, from where the lecture’s title derives.  It seeks to illustrate how a certain mode of comedy within modernity encourages us to take an almost Utopian pleasure in seeing ourselves as ungrounded: as lacking in content and produced, rather, from form; as less expressive subjects than formally dynamic objects; as a series of costumes rather than a projection of an identity; as an endless exceeding of our boundaries, rather than a modest respecter of limits; even as immortal as opposed to being trapped in our bodily finitude.  I simply ask whether the comic image of such a human might not be a pragmatically effective thing to consider at this tricky moment in which we now find ourselves.

 

11 April 2013

Elizabeth Wells, Mt. Allison University

"The Jewish West Side Story"

West Side Story, the canonic American musical of 1957, has always stood as a stark portrayal of juvenile violence, racial tension and star-crossed love.  Both its musical and choreographic techniques mark the work as a turning point in the style and structure of musical theatre, ushering in a new era of more modern and integrated musical theatre works that were made possible by its particular innovations.  Fewer are aware that the musical began life as a tale of warring Catholics and Jews on Manhattan’s East Side, shifting the ethnic focus quite substantially from the work we now know.  Although the Dance at the Gym and “America” have become synonymous with the Puerto Rican flavor of the work, the original production was planned with a Passover Seder as one of the central numbers.  The authors’ own identities as Jews have been discussed by Greg Lawrence in Dance with Demons, his biography of Jerome Robbins, and by Arthur Laurents in his own autobiography, Original Story By, substantiating how important these identities were to the creative process and the underlying themes of the show.  Leonard Bernstein, as well, explored Jewish themes in his early compositions, and an ongoing fascination with the Jewish topos crops up in his musical-theatre works, specifically Candide.

Interrogating the musical’s roots as an expression of Jewish identity at mid-century reframes this canonic work in a fascinating light, exposing  the tensions and agendas of its collaborators, producers, and audiences.  Through an investigation of primary source documents from the Leonard Bernstein archive at the Library of Congress, and recent oral history interviews with Arthur Laurents, a new and more complex West Side Story emerges, reframing this musical as a potent commentary on Jewish identity and lived experience in the 1950s. West Side Story arguably will remain known as a plea for racial and ethnic tolerance; however, viewing that plea as a statement of post-war Jewish social and cultural concerns raises larger questions of how Jewish identity on Broadway spoke to its audiences and critics during its time, and continues to speak to our own.

12 April 2013, 10:00 a.m. - Noon, ESM 514

Elizabeth Wells, Mt. Allison University

Music History Pedagogy Workshop: "Teaching (Music History)"

In 2010, Elizabeth Wells was recognized as one of ten outstanding university teachers in Canada. This year she published a chapter on "Evaluation and Assessment" in the collection The Music History Classroom, edited by James A. Davis (Ashgate). Prof. Wells received her PhD in Musicology from Eastman in 2004.

 

18 April 2013

The John Cage Lecture Series: Robert Haskins, University of New Hampshire

"John Cage and Zen: What Did He Know, When Did He Know It, How We Find Out, and Why We Should Care"

Co-sponsored with the departments of Music Theory and Composition

John Cage’s connections to Zen Buddhism are quite familiar from his published writings and interviews. The following summarizes his account: crises in his personal and professional life led him fortuitously to Indian spiritual traditions, then the mystical writings of Meister Eckhart and Taoism, and finally and most decisively attending lectures by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki at Columbia University for a two- or three-year period that ranges—in his recollection—from 1945 to 1947 and 1949 to 1951. Most scholars agree that, at the very least, Zen offered Cage a useful insight into the articulation of his particular musical aesthetic, and, as he himself said on many occasions, helped him to cope with the psychological unease he felt and pointed toward a way in which other people could similarly change their minds and improve the world they lived in. Nevertheless, understanding the actual nature of his encounter with Zen Buddhism, the adoption of Zen principles into his life and creative work, and Zen’s overall significance has been a vexing issue in Cage studies.

One important way in which previous scholarship has addressed this question notes the profound turn toward Zen imagery to be found in a trio of lectures from the early 1950s, “Lecture on Nothing,” “Lecture on Something,” and “Juilliard Lecture,” and has drawn on various kinds of sources to refine the chronology about these writings. Kay Larson has recently proposed that “Lecture on Something” was the first of the lectures to be written, in contrast to the conventional view that it follows the earliest one, “Lecture on Nothing.” I will argue that Cage’s turn toward Zen can be documented fairly precisely between the spring of 1950 and the winter of 1951, the most likely period during which he made “Lecture on Nothing”; I will reconsider elements of previous chronologies and refine them by drawing on clues within the text, examining a heretofore unknown source for it, and making comparisons with the other two. My broader goal aims to offer support for the idea that understanding the significance of Cage’s Zen is one of both historical and musicological importance.

 

2 May 2013

Margot Fassler, University of Notre Dame

"Hildegard and the Virtues: Scivias, the Ordo Virtutum, and the Exhortatio Virtutum"

 

The study explores 1) the natures of the Virtues as they establish the Ordo Virtutum's complicated meanings, including Hildegard's visual depictions of these characters 2) the relationships between the play, the playlet at the close of the treatise, and the treatise itself and 3) the ways that Hildegard's choices of musical materials underscore her dramatic and theological intentions.   The work is prefatory to a digital model being created at Notre Dame on an ACLS grant and in conjunction with the nuns of the Abbey of St. Hildegard, Eibingen.

 

MUY Symposium Speakers Fall 2012

13 September 2012

Lloyd Whitesell, McGill University

"Notes of Unbelonging"

Benjamin Britten’s late exploration of heterophonic sound provided the basis for a new dramatic symbolism, based on temporal and textural alignment. In his last opera, Death in Venice, texture is a highly ambiguous symbol. I illustrate Gustav von Aschenbach’s experience of temporal dislocation, woven into the very fabric of the music, in the light of theories of queer temporal dissonance and a recent antisocial turn in queer studies.

27-30 September 2012

EROI Festival 2012: "Bach and the Organ"

A joint presentation of the Eastman Rochester Organ Initiative and the American Bach Society

A four-day festival, with papers from prominent international Bach scholars and concerts from renowned organists and members of the Boston Early Music Chamber Ensemble.  Peter Williams (musicologist and organist) will give the keynote address, and the Craighead-Saunders organ in Christ Church (a precise replica of a Casparini instrument from 1776) will be at the center of much activity.

For a full schedule of the conference, please visit the dedicated website.

11 October 2012

Georgia Cowart, Case Western Reserve University

"Performing/Transforming French Identity: Watteau and the Musical Theater"

Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) worked briefly as a set painter at the Paris Opera House around 1702-1703, and a number of his most well-known paintings can be explained via a series of pieces performed in the musical theater of that time. These works encode a critique of the increasingly unpopular rule of the aging Louis XIV while offering utopian visions of a new France. Drawing on the opera, ballet, and commedia dell'arte, the presentation will examine the imagery of The French Comedians, The Italian Comedians, Mezzetin, and other works as they respond to and participate in a theatrical game of masks involving satire, parody, and allusion.

 

25 October 2012

pre-AMS talks: 

Ellen Koskoff, Professor of Ethnomusicology

"Analyzing the Four-Tone Universe of Balinese Gamelan Angklung Music"

Ethnomusicology has had a long-standing love-hate relationship with traditional musical analysis. Most often a formal process, largely applied in the past to western classical music,analysis asks the basic question, how does the music work? To answer, the analyst generally uses a printed score, or transcription to translate the work’s aural presence into the world of “thing-ness,” and often applies modeling or mathematically based theories to show how the piece is structured and could/should be heard or played. From 200 7 to 2008 , I lived in Bali Indonesia, studying and performing a repertoire of Hindu cremation music with musicians from Banjar Baturity in Southwestern Bali. I had been initially attracted to this repertoire because gamelan angklung music uses only four notes to the octave—creating a wonderfully vibrant four-tone universe that piqued my inner analyst’s curiosity. The music is learned orally/aurally and is not improvised, simply absorbed by musicians from life-long exposure to the recurring rituals of death and cremation. When I first heard the pieces, I recorded them and listened to them constantly, not attempting to write them down; I wanted to learn them orally, like the Balinese. When I left the field and returned home I soon realized that, while still interested in my basic question, I could not adequately answer it without taking into account the oral fieldwork process through which I had learned the music. This process, filled with countless, basic musical misunderstandings, would ultimately lead to at least three different analyses: a (hopefully) sensitive analysis based on transcription and all my training as a western musician; a Balinese social-musical analysis, based on language, metaphor, and context; and a perhaps personal cognitive analysis based on trying to learn this music through listening and participating in its culturally appropriate performance. This paper explores these separate, sometimes overlapping analyses to ask not only: how does this music work, but also for whom and why.

Katy Hutchings, Musicology PhD Student

"What’s So New about Nova Musica? Johannes Ciconia and Early Quattrocento Theories of Imitation"

In contrast to numerous other treatises with the words “New” and “Music” in their titles, the Nova musica of Johannes Ciconia (ca. 1370–1412) eschews the most cutting-edge topics of discourseamong fifteenth-century music theorists: mensural notation, hexachordal solmization, and counterpoint. Indeed, Nova musica names no musical authorities or repertories more recent than the eleventh century. How, then, may musicologists reconcile the conservative contents of the treatise with its more progressive title—and with Ciconia’s reputation as a composer of progressive polyphony? This paper proposes that the novelty of Nova musica derives from its renovation of music according to Quattrocento theories of literary imitation. The preface to the first book of Nova musica defines “new music” as an accretion of authoritative sayings that have been reordered and transformed into a new entity. Key passages from the De inventione of Cicero, the Epistolae morales of Seneca the Younger, and the Saturnalia of Macrobius describe the imitation of multiple models in similar terms of selective gathering, re-organization, and transformation. Humanist pedagogues, writers, and painters in Ciconia’s circles cite such passages as the basis for their own theories of imitation. Nova musica, I argue, alludes to the same passages. Moreover, Ciconia’s reformulation of musica according to pre-eleventh-century doctrines parallels his fellow humanists’ endeavors to rebuild the language and even the basic structure of their respective disciplines according to antique models. Margaret Bent and Anne Hallmark have published landmark studies that link Ciconia’s polyphony with early fifteenth-century humanism and humanist rhetoric. By demonstrating that humanist rhetorical concepts like imitation also inflected Ciconia’s music-theoretical thinking, this paper seeks to unite the seemingly dichotomous personalities of Ciconia the composer and theorist. Finally, Ciconia’s appropriation of imitation theory broaches the possibility that other fifteenth-century musicians considered it a valuable music-theoretical device.

 

Saturday, 27 October 2012, 9:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Hatch Recital Hall

The Prismatic Debussy: "A festival celebrating the 150th anniversary of Claude Debussy’s birth"

One-day conference on unknown early songs of Debussy. Concluding event of Eastman's "The Prismatic Debussy" festival.

 

8 November 2012

AMS Roundup

Thursday, 15 November 2012, 3:30-5:00 p.m., Composition Symposium, ESM 209

The Cage Lecture:  Chris Shultis, University of New Mexico

"The Dialectics of Experimentalism"

Co-sponsored with the departments of Music Theory and Composition