Musicology - Events

Fall

15 SEPTEMBER 2011

Eric Drott, University of Texas at Austin

"Genre, Identity, Politics"

This paper elaborates themes raised in my recent book, Music and the Elusive Revolution, focusing in particular on how genre at once enables and constrains music’s capacity to serve as a medium for political expression. My argument unfolds in three parts. I begin with an overview of the political upheavals that shook France during the uprising of May–June 1968, and the very different responses the wave of protests and strikes elicited among performers and composers working in different musical traditions. The second section of the paper then presents a more extended case-study, considering the curious career of singer-songwriter turned Maoist militant Dominique Grange, as a way of illuminating the complex interactions that bind together genre, identity, and politics. In the final section of my paper, I discuss how my research engages with, and in certain cases furnishes a useful corrective to, recent musicological discourse on music’s relation to politics. 

13 OCTOBER 2011

David Giovannoni, founder of First Sounds

"Humanity's First Recordings of Its Own Voice"

In mid-nineteenth-century France, during the dawn of practical photography, amateur inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville conceived of a machine that did with sound what the camera did with light. Between 1854 and 1860 he experimented with focusing airborne sounds of speech and music onto paper, thereby capturing what had theretofore been ephemeral. His phonautograph bore a striking resemblance to Edison's phonograph of twenty years later. But his recordings, unlike Edison's, were meant to be read by the eye, not heard by the ear.

For a century-and-a-half his experiments lay quietly in the venerable French archives in which he deposited them. Then in 2007 a few audio historians hypothesized there was a real possibility that modern technology could develop these experimental recordings like dormant photographic plates. Instead of exposing images, however, these would bear sounds—perhaps even humanity's first recordings of its own voice!

This presentation recounts how the speaker and his colleagues have identified dozens of these forgotten documents and coaxed several to talk and to sing. A principal in their discovery and recovery, the speaker is the first person since Scott de Martinville to personally examine every recording. He will explain how they were made and how they are played. He will discuss Scott de Martinville's experiments, his reception in established scientific circles, and his early descent into an unmarked grave.

MONDAY, 24 OCTOBER 2011, 3:30 P.M., ESM 305

Gunther Schuller

A discussion of the Beethoven Fifth chapter in his book, The Compleat Conductor

27 OCTOBER 2011

AMS Preview 1:

Patrick Macey

"Henricus Isaac and Carnival Songs on Texts by Lorenzo de' Medici"

Henricus Isaac is reported to have composed a three-voice musical setting for one of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s carnival songs, the Canto de’ Confortini, but the music has apparently not survived. Anonymous musical settings do survive for other carnival songs with texts by Lorenzo, and this paper will explore evidence that Isaac composed music for seven of these songs. All the songs are preserved in fragmentary form in the closing fascicles of Florence, BNC, Banco rari 230 (BR 230). This well-known manuscript of Italian songs has been studied by D’Accone (complete facsimile edition, 1986) and Prizer, among others. Five of Lorenzo’s carnival songs in BR 230 lack either the superius or the tenor and bassus voices, but other sources preserve complete settings (STB) for two of them, the Canto de’ Profumi and the Trionfo di Bacco. Isaac’s surviving secular songs provide a model for reconstructing several more of the fragmentary carnival songs; passages in his secular songs reappear in carnival songs in BR 230, thus permitting their partial reconstruction. Other musical elements, such as standard cadential figures and contrapuntal considerations, limit the choices for the reconstructed parts. In this way, three further carnival songs for Lorenzo’s texts can be at least partially recovered. BR 230 also preserves the tenor and bassus for two more songs in carnival style. These lack the words, yet details of the interior phrasing provide a close fit with the prosody of particular carnival songs by Lorenzo. While only two complete musical settings for Lorenzo’s eleven carnival song texts have been preserved, this study will add five reconstructions, for a total of seven songs. The musical style of these songs bears striking similarities to other secular songs by Isaac, and is distinct from that of contemporary Florentine composers. I will also refer to the work of Judith Bryce in Renaissance Quarterly 2001, and consider the function of these songs (addressed to the women of Florence) as inducements for young wives to procreate, vital for a society that mandated marriage of teenage girls to financially secure, but often unattractive, older men.

Ralph P. Locke

"Musical Exoticism 1500–1750: Some Methodological Considerations and Case Studies"

Several recent musicologists have objected to applying the terms “exotic/exoticism” to works from what historians call the Early Modern period (ca. 1500–1800). Bloechl (2008), for example, argues that the term misleads because representations of place (ethnicity, etc.) in music before 1800 differed in crucial ways from those after 1800 (with the advent of folklorederived—and often Herder-inspired—musical nationalism and musical “local color”). Yet “exotic” was a standard pre-1800 word for faraway lands (e.g., Rabelais 1552). It remains appropriate, I argue, to musical products of those earlier centuries once its distinct ways of working are properly understood.

Overviews of musical exoticism (MGG2, Bellman 1996, Head 2003, Bartoli 2007, Taylor 2007, Locke 2001/2007/2009) have not adequately stressed this disparity between pre-and post-1800 practices (rightly noted by Bloechl). True, exotic portrayals before 1800 did not generally employ distinctive style markers. Nonetheless, they were regularly assisted by musical means of more usual (not exotic-sounding) kinds. This point may seem counterintuitive today because our thinking about musical exoticism tends to be shaped by heavily mimetic portrayals of Otherness in opera (Madama Butterfly), musical comedy, and film.

I will sketch here, for the first time, an overview of the ways in which musical exoticism operated during the period 1500–1800, setting forth five interrelated factors: 1) a genre’s expressive capabilities (e.g., opera’s vivid portrayals of rage, seductiveness, etc.); 2) a genre’s inherent/“structural” constraints (e.g., partial or entire wordlessness in danced works and in opera marches/processions); 3) non-musical components (e.g., exotic costume designs for tournaments, court ballets, operas); 4) disparities between surviving notation and actual performance (e.g., added percussion); and 5) contemporaneous beliefs about specific peoples and Europe’s relationship to them (e.g., colonization, empire, Barbary pirates).

These factors will be applied to four case studies: the famous British ballad (“Lord Bateman”) about an Englishman taken captive by a “savage Moor” and put to hard labor; a solo for “Palestine” in a Kapsberger sacred opera (1622); a Luigi Rossi cantata (ca. 1650) in which a Turkish woman threatens to burn the Koran; and the woman-besotted Indian rajah Poro in operas based on Metastasio’s Alessandro libretto (Handel’s Poro and Hasse’s Cleofide, both 1731).

3 NOVEMBER 2011

AMS Preview 2:

Holly Watkins

"The Economics of Musical Space"

In recent years, the concept of musical space has enjoyed a remarkable rise in intellectual fortunes. While the many permutations of this concept can be traced back to the writings of Heinrich Schenker, Arnold Schoenberg, and Hugo Riemann, the rush to codify new dimensions of musical space—from pitch space, combinatorial space, and voice-leading space to the proliferating spaces of neo-Riemannian and transformation theory—points to a shift in the significance of spatial metaphors that reflects the emergence of postmodernism in the industrialized West. Shedding the quasi-mystical meanings cherished by modernists such as Schoenberg, the notion of musical space in contemporary theory bespeaks the economic logic of late capitalism, a logic readily evident in the metaphors of efficiency and wealth now common in theoretical writing.

Reflecting on the ubiquity of spatial terminology in professional and academic discourse, French sociologist Henri Lefebvre remarks that “the very multiplicity of these descriptions and sectionings makes them suspect.” Lefebvre’s The Production of Space argues that the plethora of rhetorical spaces in circulation today exemplifies “a very strong—perhaps even the dominant—tendency within present-day society and its mode of production. Under this mode of production, intellectual labor, like material labor, is subject to endless division.” The seemingly endless assortment of musical spaces resemble so many markets, sectors, and niches—conceptual spaces redoubled in the physical spaces “inhabited by the technocrats in their silent offices,” as Lefebvre memorably puts it.

Yet the fragmentation Lefebvre diagnoses is offset by the homogeneous character of conceptual space—musical space included. Responding to studies by David Lewin, Joseph Straus, Fred Lerdahl, and others, this paper illuminates the dialectic of fragmentation and homogeneity at work in influential accounts of musical space by exposing the under-theorized mathematical backdrop that serves as these studies’ point of departure. The paper then explores ways that the concept of musical space might be broadened by revisiting the music of Wagner’s Parsifal—the stimulus driving so much transformational and neo-Riemannian theory—and its paradoxical relationship to notions of place, space, art, and commodification in nineteenth-century Germany.

Lisa Jakelski

"New Sound, New Ears: Listening at the Warsaw Autumn in the Early 1960s"

Early reviews of the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music are surprisingly noisy. Critics recorded whistling, hissing, grumbling, sighs, and outbursts of spontaneous applause—all sounds that engaged with the music onstage, but which emerged from the audience. For many in the crowd, vocal responses and contemporary music went hand in hand. Examining audience behavior at the Warsaw Autumn can thus shed new light on the institutionalization of avant-garde aesthetics in Cold-War Poland. This paper explores what it meant to listen to the festival concerts from 1958 to 1966. Drawing on archival documents, I demonstrate that audiences and their behaviors were an integral element of how organizers mediated the Warsaw Autumn during its first decade; reports to Poland’s Ministry of Culture often cited high audience turnout as proof of the festival’s social utility. I also reconstruct audience responses on the basis of eyewitness press accounts, in which descriptions of listeners’ reactions loom large in nearly every review, and the recollections of longtime participants. I argue that the circumstances of the Warsaw Autumn affected audiences’ practices and perceptions in two primary ways. One of these was political, in which diverse audience responses reinforced a conception of the festival as a space of freedom within the Soviet bloc. The other was through being a presentation of contemporary music, which aroused continual audience expectations to hear the new. The annual rituals of Warsaw Autumn concert-going promoted the growth of a particular kind of musical literacy among Polish audiences, one that interfaced with socialist educational efforts and was marked by a familiarity with modernist compositional techniques, avant-garde experimentation, and more traditional musical means. Through breaking the silence that reigned elsewhere in Polish concert life, Warsaw Autumn listeners could broadcast their reactions to new works, while gaining real-time feedback via others’ embodied responses. But if the political charge of publicly expressing opinions at the festival concerts proved to be renewable, the frisson of listening to avant-garde music, I suggest, ultimately was harder to sustain.

17 NOVEMBER 2011

AMS Roundup

TUESDAY, 6 DECEMBER 2011, 4:30 P.M., CIMINELLI FORMAL LOUNGE

Steven Stucky, Cornell University

"Modernism and the 'Main Stream': Another Look"

Co-sponsored with the Department of Music Theory

Spring

16 FEBRUARY

Eliot Bates, Cornell University

"Engineering Turkish Music: Latency, Auditory Images, and Sensoriums of the Studio"

The recording studio is a place for thresholds--for performing at the limits of human kinesthetic capabilities, for listening at the threshold of inaudibility or the threshold of pain, and for creating organized sound on the spectrum from formalized musical works to rampant unstructured explorations in sound.  Such thresholds may exist elsewhere but become most apparent in the studio environment, as studios have formalized uses and subdivisions of interior space, clearly delineated occupations, and codified workflows for sound creation, sound listening, re-sounding, and enlisting other senses in the domain of sound.

In this talk I will propose a four-part framework for theorizing the experience of studio work and its relation to musical aesthetics. First, I introduce the concept of latency--the temporal delays inherent to digital audio systems and human auditory perception. Second, I discuss auditory images, or the many ways in which sound is "imagined" and audible phenomena are rendered visible. Third, I analyze the nature of studio professions and how the social norms of studios come to have aesthetic effects. Fourth, I consider how engineers, studio musicians and arrangers cultivate unique sensoriums and kinesthetics that enable them to do studio work.

To render audible this framework, I draw on my own participant-observational field research in the recording studios of Turkey and the Turkish/Kurdish diasporas in Europe, with a particular focus on computer-based studios that produce arranged folkloric and urban art musics.

1 MARCH 2012

Peter Hoesing, Florida State University

"Sound Medicine: the Performance of Healing in Post-Colonial Uganda"

Forty miles southwest of Kampala, Uganda, over 100 healers from Buwama sub-county gather each week for research, training, and professional development.  These members of an international non-governmental organization (NGO) called Promotion des Médecins Traditionelles (PROMETRA) serve their respective village communities as primary health-care providers.  Their music, dance and drama troupe, along with their specialists in plant medicine and spiritual healing, often specifically address the needs of local HIV/AIDS patients.  Many members of the troupe are also HIV positive.  Their varied performances integrate didactic skits on HIV/AIDS prevention and palliation with a very old repertory for healing ritual called kusamira.  Unlike many performing groups who directly address HIV and AIDS in Uganda, PROMETRA advocates the use of both clinical medicine and indigenous homeopathic methods.

During the African Union’s recent "Decade of Traditional Medicine" (2001-2010), African nations have worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) to recognize traditional medicine as a cornerstone of primary health-care and wellness maintenance in Sub-Saharan Africa.  Conservative estimates suggest that 80 percent of the population turn to indigenous healers for their primary health-care needs.  In a place where so many patients live beyond the reach of sorely inadequate health-care systems, indigenous healers help to improve and maintain the quality of life for many of those living with AIDS.

Beyond recent concerns with HIV/AIDS and the proliferation of NGO performance groups during the present era of post-colonial development, kusamira repertories prove consistent with a much deeper historical trajectory of music in Ugandan indigenous medicine. My research examines the sonic qualities of such medicine, pursuing questions about how indigenous healers use music in medical interventions and what that music sounds like.  As sustainable, effective approaches to HIV/AIDS and other public health issues engage with local cultural logics of illness and wellness, I suggest that understanding these categories begins with listening to how healers and patients articulate them.

8 MARCH 2012

Nancy Toff, Oxford University Press

"Nancy Drew Meets Georges Barrère: Adventures in the Archives"

Co-sponsored with the Flute Department

Nancy Toff, author of Monarch of the Flute: The Life of Georges Barrère, will use examples of archival and secondary research sources to demonstrate both the adventure and the techniques of biographical research.  Her research for the biography of Barrère took her to some sixty libraries and archives and utilized a vast bibliography of secondary sources in the United States, France, and elsewhere.  She also conducted oral histories with forty-five friends, colleagues, and relatives of Barrère.  In her talk she will explain how she extracted key information from ephemera such as concert programs and flyers, letters, newspapers and periodicals, and secondary literature such as biographies and institutional histories and wove them together to create a biography of an important twentieth-century musician—even though he left no collection of personal papers.

Georges Barrère (1876-1944) holds a preeminent place in the history of American flute playing.  Best known for two of the landmark works that were written for him―the Poem of Charles Tomlinson Griffes and Density 21.5 by Edgard Varèse―he was the most prominent early exemplar of the Paris Conservatoire tradition in the United States and set a new standard for American woodwind performance, including the universal adoption of the silver flute.  A student of Paul Taffanel at the Paris Conservatoire, at age eighteen Barrère premiered Debussy’s landmark Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.  He went on to become solo flutist of the Concerts Colonne and to found the Société Moderne d'Instruments a Vent, a pioneering woodwind ensemble that premiered sixty-one works for forty composers in its first ten years.  Invited by Walter Damrosch to become principal flute of the New York Symphony in 1905, he founded the woodwind department at the Institute of Musical Art (later Juilliard).  His many ensembles toured the United States, building new audiences for chamber music and promoting French repertoire as well as new American music.  He collaborated with the finest musicians and artists of his day, among them Isadora Duncan, Yvette Guilbert, André Caplet, Paul Hindemith, Albert Roussel, Wallingford Riegger, and Henry Brant.  All told he premiered some 170 works, and more than fifty are dedicated to him.  His students include William Kincaid, Meredith Willson, Lamar Stringfield, Frances Blaisdell, Samuel Baron, and Bernard Goldberg.

22 MARCH 2012

Jann Pasler, University of California, San Diego

"Musical Hybridity in Flux: Representing Race, Colonial Policy, and Modernity in French North Africa, 1860s-1930s"

Cosponsored with the Eastman Committee on Diversity

29 MARCH 2012

Kate van Orden, University of California, Berkeley

"Musica Transalpina: Janequin and the French in Italy"

The programmatic chansons of Clément Janequin were enduringly popular south of the Alps.  La bataglie, Le rossignol, etc. were printed until at least 1577 and are inventoried in the collections of a Paduan music teacher (1560), the Accademia Filarmonica di Verona (1562), and San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome (1583).  One sign of their importance is the way their unique appearance inspired the creation of note negre madrigals in the 1540s.

Working outward from the networks of French composers, singers, printers, and patrons in Italy, this paper tracks Janequin’s noisy chansons into private music lessons, Venetian salons, and Roman choirs at mid century. Janequin’s detailed notation provided extraordinary scripts for the performance of Frenchness by native speakers living abroad and Italians fascinated by oltremontani, their language, and foreign manners.  Drawing upon theories from diaspora studies, I interpret accounts of these transalpine exchanges as a music history of ethnic encounter within Europe itself.

12 APRIL 2012

Berthold Hoeckner, University of Chicago

"The Autonomy of (Musical) Affect and Economies of (Cinematic) Emotion"

Affect theory posits that affect is pre-personal, while emotions are social. For Eric Shouse, the power of modern media lies "not so much in their ideological effects, but in their ability to create affective resonances independent of content or meaning." Music, especially, exemplifies "how the intensity of the impingement of sensations on the body can 'mean' more to people than meaning itself." The "autonomy of affect" (Brian Massumi) tackles this paradox. It assumes that affect is "captured" in the  production of emotion, yet escapes full conversion. Thus classical Hollywood cinema often deploys music because its affective potential remains active beyond such incomplete emotional capture.

I focus on Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You (1938) and George Stevens's I Remember Mama (1948)--two morality tales that devise different roles for art in a modern market economy, depending on how affect is converted into emotional currency. Capra stages a contest between commodity and gift economies, where music contributes to a state of prelapsarian play, whose affective surplus heals ailing bodies and mends social relations. Stevens affirms that cultural capital can be derived from free affective labor, like that of an early twentieth-century Norwegian immigrant mother who sings a song to her sick child--an incident her older daughter (an aspiring writer) turns into a story whose publication secures the family's financial survival.