AMSGNY Meetings

 

The Winter meeting of the AMSGNY will take place online on Saturday, February 7, 2026.  The Zoom code is

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/4861123413?pwd=c0podGRzbVVtZnUwd2pBMGpFVm41UT09

 

Schedule:

Discussion and Voting on a Few Issues 10-10:15

 

Session 1 10:15-11:15

Locating Julius Eastman, Asking Toward the Archive

Gia Dreyer, Hunter College - CUNY

 

Compositional “Translation” in Unsuk Chin’s Operascope (2023), Subito con forza (2020), and Frontispiece (2019)

Ji Yeon Lee  (University of Houston)

 

Session 2  11:30-12:30

The Ballad as Art Song: Kim Dong-Ryul's Classical Appropriations and the Reconfiguration of Korean Popular Music

Mi Kyung Hwang

Laura Marling: Religiously Nontheistic 

Murray Nielsen (University of Ottawa)

 

Session 3  1-2:30
The Musical Aesthetic: A Poetic Touch of Zhaoyi's "Longing for My Love." in Contemporary Chinese Piano Composition

Edy Panjaitan (Ohio University)

Forging a Nation Identity--The 1790 Collection of Russian Folksongs  with Their Tunes Set to Music by Ivan Peach

Artis Wodehouse  (Bronx, NY)

 

 “Odd Angles and Trick Floors”: A Closer Look at the Horn Trios of Johannes Brahms and György Ligeti

Ayden Adler (University of Houston-Downtown)

Abstracts and Biographies

 

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“Odd Angles and Trick Floors”: A Closer Look at the Horn Trios of Johannes Brahms and György Ligeti

 Ayden Adler

 

Abstract:

In 1982, Ligeti completed his Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano and subtitled it “Hommage à Brahms,” recalling Brahms’s Trio, Op. 40, composed for the same instrumentation. This homage, however, is more problematic than it originally appears. In numerous interviews, Ligeti vehemently disavowed any connection to Brahms beyond the subtitle of the work. Critics and scholars who commented upon the subtitle soon after its publication (e.g., Griffiths (1983), Morton (1996), Steinitz (1996), Searby (2001)), took Ligeti’s assertion at face value and failed to seek any substantive connections between the two Trios. This paper, however, calls upon Bloom’s theory of “the anxiety of influence,” the composer’s own caveat that the work contains “odd angles and trick floors,” and argues that Ligeti’s claim is, in fact, counterintuitive.

My detailed analysis illustrates how Brahms’s influence on this work first emerges formally, in the structure of the work, and continues to pervade each movement, materializing in evermore subtle details, including the use of horn fifths, hemiolas, and horn calls. Ligeti’s and Brahms’s attitudes to their musical pasts additionally intertwine in their Horn Trios: the use of the natural horn in both works links the composers’ attempts to engage nostalgically with timbres and colors in music of the past, grieve the futility of returning, and wrestle with the impossibility of going forward. This critical look at these two exemplars of the horn trio genre reaches a more nuanced understanding of Ligeti’s Trio and aligns with current research on Ligeti’s late works and the composer’s fraught relationship to the musical past.

 

Bio: With degrees from Princeton University (A.B.), the Juilliard School (M.M.), and the Eastman School of Music (M.A., D.M.A., Ph.D. (Musicology)), Dr. Ayden Adler serves as Associate Professor at the University of Houston-Downtown. After winning the Society for American Music’s Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award, Dr. Adler has balanced musicological research, presenting, and publishing with performance and administrative work, including performing for ten years as a tenured member of the horn section of the Rochester (NY) Philharmonic Orchestra while teaching at the Eastman School of Music; serving as Executive Director of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra after leading the Education and Community Partnerships departments at the Atlanta and Philadelphia Orchestras; and serving as Dean of the Conservatory at Michael Tilson Thomas’ New World Symphony and as Dean of the School of Music at DePauw University. While her research on György Ligeti harks back to her horn-playing years, she is concurrently working on a book project, Orchestrating Whiteness: Serge Koussevitzky, Arthur Fiedler, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, under contract with the University of Illinois Press, to address the historical roots of systemic racism in classical music in the United States.

 

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Locating Julius Eastman, Asking Toward the Archive

Gia Dreyer, Hunter College - CUNY

 

Abstract:

The composer-performer Julius Eastman is a name with further recognition and scholarship than prior to his death. This revived notoriety proliferated as a result of the digital age–mass audiences have now encountered Eastman’s work through the CD set Unjust Malaise and its existence on the internet. In this paper, I reflect on Julius Eastman’s posthumous existence by returning to the question posed in the title of Renate Strauss’s seminal article, “Julius Eastman: Will the Real One Stand Up?” This is a reference to a television game show titled “To Tell The Truth,” where contestants had to discern the real celebrity against two other imposters. I follow this historical play in relation to contemporaneous themes of parasociality, critiquing the apparatuses of anti-blackness and homophobia that perpetuated the forgetting of Julius Eastman within his lifetime. The parasocial dynamic which reconstitutes Julius Eastman in memory for a subject is a far easier act than to acknowledge the manufactured denial of his humanity as he lived. These multiplicious violences establish the capacity for Julius Eastman to be none other than Eastman-for-another. Is Julius Eastman reified as a technology in the bare representation of the posthumous, the corpus in excess against the corporeal?

 

BIO:

Gia Dreyer (b. 2000) is a composer and ethnomusicologist from New Jersey. The relationship between the dissociation of identity in everyday experience and the incompleteness of aesthetic experience is expressed in their music praxis. In 2023, Gia enrolled in the Graduate Program at Hunter College, NYC. They are pursuing a dual master's degree in music composition and ethnomusicology to be completed by Fall 2025.

 

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The Ballad as Art Song: Kim Dong-Ryul's Classical Appropriations and the Reconfiguration of Korean Popular Music

Mi Kyung Hwang

 

K-pop scholarship has overwhelmingly defined the genre through idol-centered dance music, visual spectacle, and choreography. Yet this framing obscures a crucial paradox: unlike dance-oriented idol music, Korean ballads have long functioned as a cross-generational, nationally shared genre. Despite this central cultural role, ballads remain marginalized in K-pop scholarship.

Keith Howard's[1] influential work traces Korean popular music transformation through the late 1990s, emphasizing ballads' importance in earlier media structures, but does not address stylistic developments in the 2000s. Hwang[2] examines 1990s-2000s K-pop ballads through political-economic perspectives, yet a sustained in-depth musicological study of Kim Dong-Ryul’s broader compositional output remains absent.

This paper addresses these omissions by focusing on Kim Dong-Ryul (b. 1974), whose profound contributions to Korean popular music transformed the ballad into art songs. Through musical analysis, I investigate how Kim integrates classical and jazz idioms into popular ballad structures, elevating the genre to art song sophistication while maintaining broad appeal. His work exemplifies K-pop modernization grounded in listening, stillness, and composer-led authorship rather than spectacle—a paradigm shift that reconfigured ballads' artistic legitimacy within Korean musical culture.

Kim has remained an active singer-songwriter for nearly three decades, demonstrating this tradition's enduring relevance. Despite his transformative influence, his music has received virtually no scholarly attention in English-language musicology. By centering Korean ballads as a national genre and foregrounding Kim Dong-Ryul's elevation of ballads to art song level, this paper reframes K-pop history beyond dance music and argues for the analytical necessity of ballads within global popular music studies.

 

[1] Keith Howard, "Exploding Ballads: The Transformation of Korean Pop Music," in Global Goes Local: Popular Culture in Asia, ed. Timothy J. Craig and Richard King (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002), 80–95.

[2] Mi Kyung Hwang, "Narratives of Modernization in K-Pop Ballads from the 1990s to 2000s" (paper presented at the AMS-SMT Joint Annual Meeting, 2025).

 Biography :

Mi Kyung Hwang has presented papers at 15 regional, national, and international conferences, including AMS regional and national meetings.  She served as Assistant Professor and Chair of Music Department at Talladega College and Coordinator of Piano Studies at Georgia State University Perimeter College, and currently serves as Choir Director and Organist at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Jasper, AL.

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Compositional “Translation” in Unsuk Chin’s Operascope (2023), Subito con forza (2020), and Frontispiece (2019)

Ji Yeon Lee  (University of Houston)

 Abstract:

The Korean composer Unsuk Chin has used the past—history, tradition, and memory—as a source of inspiration, motivation, compositional technique, instrumentation, and conceptual frameworks. Yet while her musical language and compositional style often show the influence of composers such as Bartók, Stravinsky, and Ligeti, she has only explicitly acknowledged referencing the sounds and styles of past composers or genres in a few recent works. This is evident in works such as Operascope (2023), Subito con forza (2020), and Frontispiece (2019). Even in these pieces, Chin eschews straightforward quotations or easily identifiable borrowings. Instead, her approach relies on large-scale concepts and allusion. For instance, she describes Operascope as a reflection on the history of opera—a “powerhouse of emotions”—incorporating subtle, conceptual influences from Verdi, Puccini, and Berg. Conversely, Subito con forza and Frontispiece serve as her (twisted) homages to the European symphonic tradition.

Drawing on Chin’s idea that “gestures typical of specific works and composers are ‘translated’ into one another in different and sometimes unexpected ways,” this paper examines Chin’s compositional “translations” as manifested in the three pieces. To clarify this concept as a core compositional strategy, I will draw on Harold Bloom’s notion of the “anxiety of influence,” focusing on how she negotiates with and reinterprets the musical legacy of her precursors. Through this exploration, this study provides deeper insights into Chin’s sophisticated engagement with the Western canon and her unique perspective on the tradition within the globalized landscape of contemporary music.

Laura Marling: Religiously Nontheistic 

Murray Nielsen (University of Ottawa)

 

Abstract:  God is no foreigner to Laura Marling’s lyrics, though the way she positions the concept is neither Christian in practice nor secular. Releasing eight studio albums in sixteen years, Marling has positioned herself as one of the leading folk artists in modern times. Marling identifies as an atheist and has said that she is “not religious by any means,” (2024) though her music contains extensive religious themes and Christian references. “I see the language of religion as more of a metaphor for internal strife and passion,” (2020) she explains.

 

Through comparative religious discourse, this paper includes a visual and lyrical analysis of Marling’s music video for her song “Sophia” which takes place in a church. Depending on the album, Christian and religious themes are present in 30-73% of her songs. Though sometimes explicitly critical as in her song “Typical” where she lyrically “condemns all religion to a pitiless end,” Marling’s secular approach to religious material is not generally pejoratively shrouded. Using Paul Linden’s (2016) methodology of insistency-based lyrical analysis, this paper catalogs and examines Marling’s use of religious themes. Marling is a product of the societal secularization happening in modern England, a process that is driving the evolution towards a “post-(ir)religious secular society” (Lois Lee, 2014) which is demonstrated by her secular use of religious reference. The themes Marling incorporated into a majority of her music seem to have evolved from their original religiosity to that of a relatable humanistic and artistic meta language.

 

Bio:

Murray Nielsen is a PhD student at the University of Ottawa in the Music and Interdisciplinary program. They hold a BA from Bishop's University and a MA in Musicology from Dalhousie University. Their research examines the connection between the music of the band The Killer and the Latter-Day Saint's hymnal.

 

The Musical Aesthetic: A Poetic Touch of Zhaoyi's "Longing for My Love." in Contemporary Chinese Piano Composition

Edy Panjaitan (Ohio University)

Abstract:

In this lecture-performance, I examine the musical aesthetic of Dan Zhaoyi’s Longing for My Love (思恋), a piano work arranged in 1991 from Gu Jianfen’s art song That Is Me (1982), situating it within the broader context of contemporary Chinese piano composition. Rather than treating the piece as a simple transcription, this study argues that Zhaoyi’s piano composition articulates a distinctly poetic mode of musical expression, one grounded in lyric restraint, cyclical return, and textural resonance. Dan Zhaoyi is one of most influential piano educators and performers, often regarded as the “godfather” of piano education in China.

Drawing on concepts from Chinese lyrical aesthetics;shū qíng chuán tǒng (抒情传统, 意境), literally tradition of expressing emotion and contemporary musicological discourse on transcription of an art song. The study explores how vocal nostalgia is transformed into an instrumental soundscape. Modal inflection, flexible meter, and layered pianistic voicing function as poetic devices that suspend narrative progression and instead cultivate an affective atmosphere of longing. The melodic line, often embedded in the middle register, evokes the remembered human voice while resisting overt dramatic climax.

Through close musical analysis, the study demonstrates how Longing for My Love reflects a contemporary Chinese pianistic sensibility in which personal memory, pedagogical lineage, and cultural affect converge. The work thus exemplifies a poetic aesthetic that privileges intimacy, inwardness, and emotional resonance over virtuosic display, contributing a significant voice to modern Chinese piano repertoire.

Bio:

Edy Panjaitan is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Arts. He studies with Dr. Garret Field with a primary focus in musicology/ethnomusicology and with Dr. Christopher Fisher, with a secondary emphasis in piano performance. His work bridges Eastern and Western pianistic traditions, bringing cross-cultural perspectives and artistic dialogue to the concert stage. He will present his final doctoral recital on April 11, 2026, at Robert Glidden Hall, Ohio University, featuring an interdisciplinary program that spans Eastern-inspired and Western piano repertoire alongside his own original piano composition, inspired by the Toba Batak musical tradition of gondang sabangunan.

Forging a Nation Identity--The 1790 Collection of Russian Folksongs  with Their Tunes Set to Music by Ivan Peach

Artis Wodehouse  (Bronx, NY)

Abstract:  First published in 1790, the Collection of Russian Folk Songs with Their Tunes Set to Music by Ivan Peach is considered by the late Richard Taruskin to be "the greatest and most culturally significant of Russian folk collections”. Tunes from the anthology became a vital source for later Russian composers, from Glinka to Stravinsky. Notably, several tunes from the collection — referred to as LPC —were also used by Beethoven in his Op. 59 Razumovsky Quartets.

 

The anthology of 100 songs was the result of the collaboration between Czech-born composer Ivan Pratch (ca. 1750-1818 — his name was mis-spelled) and the prolific Russian polymath of the Enlightenment, Nikolai Lvov (1753-1803). The songs are scored on three staves in standard notation. The top staff features the melody with lyrics.  The bottom two staffs are intended for a keyboardist: one staff doubles the melody in the right hand, and the other fills in a traditionally harmonized left hand accompaniment.

 

Lvov’s preface reflects ideas of the time that centered on the rise of Russian national identity.  He groups songs according to defined categories: slower, non-danceable songs; ancient songs; songs of more recent origin; dance songs; outdoor and ritual songs, and Ukrainian songs.

 

Wodehouse will provide an overview musical analysis of each type and demonstrate salient examples on her restored 1827 Tomlinson square piano.

 

Bio: Pianist, harmoniumist, pianolist and  MIDI editor, independent scholar Artis Wodehouse has devoted her career to preserving and disseminating neglected but valuable music and instruments from the past. She maintains a personal collection of antique pianos, reed organs and European harmoniums on which she performs, records and creates videos for YouTube.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The fall meeting will take place at the CUNY Graduate Center, room 3491, on Saturday, September 13^th.

 We invite all to attend, but you MUST register in advance at https://forms.gle/JiEpcpBAK8hzd1QeA.  The deadline is Thursday, September 11^th at 10 AM. 

10 AM to 12 Noon—Music and Controversy

Political Expression in the Music of Steve Lacy

Daniel Blake (John Jay College)

 

The Not-So-Secrets of True Womanhood: Performing Liza Lehmann’s Secrets of the Heart

Lindsay Campbell (Graduate Center)

Fétis, Gobineau, Wagner, Schenker: Continuities and Discontinuities in the History of Music Theory

Barry Wiener (Bronx, NY)

 

A Far-Away Place and Some Strange-Sounding Names:  Bert Williams and George Walker Visit Abyssinia

John Graziano (Graduate Center and City College)

 

12 Noon to 12:30 PM—Lunch

12:30-12:45—Business Meeting

12:45 to 2:45 PM—Mostly Chopin

Falling Between the Cracks:  Domestic Classical U.S. A. Piano Music, 1936-1946

Artis Wodehouse (Bronx, NY)

 

The Cultivation of Touch and the Personified Voice of Chopin’s Pleyel of 1848, No. 14810
MyungJin Oh (Rutgers University)

 

An Odyssey of Madness: Melancholia, Nostalgia, and Obsession in Chopin's Op. 50, No. 3

Emily A. Travaline  (The Graduate Center, CUNY)

 

Between Tempest and Poetry: A Performative Interpretation of Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2

Edy Rapika Panjaitan (Ohio University)

 

 

                                    Political Expresssion In the Music of Steve Lacy

Daniel Blake (John Jay College)

This presentation explores political expression in the early music of pioneering soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy (1934-2004). Of particular interest to this study is a transition in Lacy’s music from the 1960s, in which radical aesthetic experimentation was a political act unto itself, to the early 1970s when more explicit anti-war messages began to appear in his compositions. Lacy’s political understanding emerged out of the economic hardship and aesthetic marginalization he experienced in New York’s free jazz scene, which he described as a “politics of survival”. The presentation examines the development of this early political understanding through a set of ambitious experiments in collective improvisations he undertook with the groundbreaking electro-acoustic ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva. By the 1970s, Lacy’s growing interest in poetry led him to develop new compositional strategies with his own bands, out of which a more overt political expression emerged. Through excerpts of recordings and scores from his early political works, the presentation argues for a fruitful connection in Steve Lacy’s musical career between experimental aesthetics on the one hand and direct political expression on the other.

 Bio:

Multi-instrumentalist and composer Daniel Blake is an active member of New York’s improvised and contemporary music scene, and also serves as Assistant Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) in New York City. He is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in music, and has worked as a composer and performer with a wide range of artists including Esperanza Spalding, Mivos Quatet, Anthony Braxton’s Tricentric Orchestra, Julian Lage and many others. His ballet Got My Wings was the recipient of a 2023 Humanities New York grant, and will be released as an album in fall 2025 on Adhyâropa Records.

 

Fétis, Gobineau, Wagner, Schenker: Continuities and Discontinuities in the History of Music Theory

Barry Wiener (Bronx, NY)

 During the 1830s and 40s, the Belgian music historian and theorist François-Joseph Fétis (1784-1871) played a significant role in the conceptualization of new, chromatic harmonic procedures in European music. However, in his final work, Histoire générale de la musique (1871), Fétis adopted racist views, which Thomas Christensen has outlined in his recent study of Fétis, Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis (2019). While researching Fétis’s papers, Christensen had noticed that the theorist owned a heavily annotated copy of Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (1855). Christensen hypothesized that Fétis drew some of his racist ideas from Gobineau’s treatise. Famously, Gobineau befriended Richard Wagner. Wagner praised the Essai, which was later utilized as a foundational document for Nazi ideology.  

 

When the American music theorist Philip Ewell prepared his epochal work on racism in American music theory, Christensen reached out to him in support, aiding him in making crucial connections in the history of racism in music theory and its manifestations in the United States. Ewell coupled the fruits of Christensen’s research with his own investigation into the life and work of the Viennese music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935), demonstrating that Schenker mentioned Gobineau five times in his diary, as well as in The Mission of German Genius (1921). Armed with this knowledge, Ewell was able to “close the circle,” asserting that there was a continuity of racist thought in music theory that began with Gobineau and found its most sinister expression in the ideas of Schenker.

 

Christensen never closely examined the parallels between Gobineau’s treatise and Fétis’s Histoire générale. Rather, he invited future scholars to investigate their correspondences of racist language and ideas. In this paper, I accept Christensen’s challenge. In addition, I examine Schenker’s engagement with the ideas of both Wagner and Gobineau.

 

Bio:
Barry Wiener is a musicologist specializing in nineteenth and twentieth-century music, sketch studies, Scandinavian music, and Jewish history and its relation to music. Wiener’s publications include articles about Ralph Shapey, Jean Sibelius, Heinrich Schenker, Per Nørgård, Ursula Mamlok, and Akemi Naito. He co-edited the Ralph Shapey special issue of Contemporary Music Review (2008) and wrote liner notes for six CDs of Mamlok's music on CRI and Bridge. Wiener has presented his research about nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century music at regional, national, and international conferences in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Israel.

 

       A Far-Away Place and Some Strange-Sounding Names:                       

 Bert Williams and George Walker Visit Abyssinia

John Graziano (Graduate Center and City College)

Musical theater has always thrived on the exotic. From the late nineteenth century through the twentieth, the action of many shows has been set in places that theatergoers would recognize, such as Coney Island or Asbury Park; shows have also been set in imaginary or foreign cities and countries, such as Gerolstein and Greenwillow. Two early Black musical shows are set in Africa; they explore how life in these exotic countries differs from that experienced by Americans. The first play, In Dahomey, was written between 1899 and 1902 by a number of playwrights. It is partially set in the West African country of Dahomey, which is now the southern part of Benin. The second play, Abyssinia, by Jesse A. Shipp (1864-1934), is set entirely in that country, which today is part of Ethiopia and Eritrea. It is a somewhat satirical commentary on the back-to-Africa movement, which was on the minds of many African Americans, especially after the resurgence of segregation at the close of the nineteenth century. In this presentation, I examine how Shipp, through the characters of some visiting American tourists, addresses the issue of returning to the African homeland by his comparisons of the realities of life in America with that of an actual African kingdom. I also demonstrate how the music by Will Marion Cook and Bert Williams complements the thrust of the script.

Bio:  John Graziano is Professor Emeritus of Music at the Music Departments of The Graduate Center and The City College of the City University of New York. He is Director of Music in Gotham, a database project, which is documenting musical events in New York City from September 1862 through August 1875. His recent publications include the book European Music and Musicians in New York City, 1840-1900, and chapters and articles on John Phillip Sousa, Harry Burleigh, and the “Black Patti”; theater orchestras in nineteenth century New York City; Edward MacDowell’s symphonic poems, Lamia and Hamlet and Ophelia; “Race and Racism” in the Oxford Handbook of Opera; and “The Many Faces of Rio Rita” in The Oxford Handbook of Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations.

 

Falling Between the Cracks:

Domestic Classical U.S. A. Piano Music, 1936-1946

Artis Wodehouse (Bronx, NY)

 

Those who began musical training at the piano undoubtedly remember

encountering educational piano music anthologies Meant to develop music

reading and technical skill, these graded folios also introduced intermediate-level

repertoire from the European canon. Easier music of Bach, Schumann, Mozart and

the like was central to these publications, since the cumulative goal was fostering

appreciation and understanding of the music by European masters. Such folios

remain in use.

But during the first half of the 20th century a large and diverse cohort of native

United States composers emerged. The media visibility generated by these home-

grown U.S. classical composers and the unprecedented diversity of their

compositional styles suggested a new but similar endeavor. In the late 1930s music

publishers Carl Fischer, E. G Marks, Music Corporation of American, Theodore

Presser and others either approached or were approached by recognized living U.S.

composers to write original piano pieces designed for pedagogical purpose. A

surprising number were both willing and able to write even one-page compositions

creatively distilling primary aspects of piano technique within their respectively

distinctive compositional approaches. Found in often difficult to locate and

forgotten anthologies, these short piano pieces offer a startling capsule summary of

the multi-faceted U.S. classical music voice that became established during the

20th Century.

The presentation will reference examples by Walter Piston, Aaron Copland, Henry

Cowell, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Wallingford Riegger, Roger Sessions, and

William Schuman.

Bio:

Pianist, harmoniumist, pianolist and MIDI editor Artis Wodehouse has

devoted her career to preserving and disseminating neglected but valuable

music and instruments from the past, with an emphasis on American

music. Cited by the NYTimes as “savior of the old and neglected”, she

received a National Endowment grant that propelled her into production of

CDs and published transcriptions of recorded performances and piano rolls

made by George Gershwin, Jelly Roll Morton and Zez Confrey. She has developed an extensive  footprint on YouTube that features musical performances, interviews and tutorials:   https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP2xElP5-hgJhjqKRWWHOpA

 

 

The Cultivation of Touch and the Personified Voice of Chopin’s Pleyel of 1848, No. 14810

MyungJin Oh (Rutgers University)

 

            In 1834, August Kahlert described Chopin’s “manner of playing” as “a denial of heaviness, based on maximum reciprocal independence of the fingers and on the lightest touch.” While Kahlert’s observation highlights Chopin’s uniquely cultivated touch, it fails to explain how Chopin imagined sounds through the material technology of the piano. How can we better understand the relationship between Chopin’s tactile experiences, the mechanical features of the piano, and the resulting tone quality, so often praised by his contemporaries?

            This presentation examines this relationship through Fryderyk Chopin’s Projet de Méthode and his 1848 Pleyel piano, No. 14810, located in the Chopin Museum in Warsaw. Applying Deirdre Loughridge’s notion of “personification,” I argue that regarding the Pleyel piano as a nonhuman entity with “its own soul” allows us to define its “personified voice”—a responsive sonic agent shaped by the pianist’s physical and expressive input. My case study combines Chopin’s own accounts of well-formed technique, contemporaneous descriptions of his performance, organological research, and my own tactile engagement with Chopin’s 1848 Pleyel. Together, these perspectives suggest how the cultivated touch of a historically informed pianist can reanimate the sonic world of Chopin and broaden our understanding of the performer-instrument relationship in early nineteenth-century piano culture.

Biography: MyungJin Oh is a Lecturer in Musicology at Rutgers University, where she earned a PhD in Musicology and a DMA in Piano Performance. Her dissertation, Timbre in Chopin’s Parisian Piano Music, 1830s–1840s, explores timbral phenomenology and aesthetics through the lenses of organology, technology, and practice-based approaches, focusing on the Parisian music of Fryderyk Chopin. From 2023 to 2025, she served as an Editorial Assistant for reviews at the Journal of the American Musicological Society, where she also contributed a review of Deirdre Loughridge’s Sounding Human: Music and Machines, 1740–2020.

 

An Odyssey of Madness: Melancholia, Nostalgia, and Obsession in Chopin's Op. 50, No. 3

Emily A. Travaline, The Graduate Center, CUNY

 

This paper investigates to what extent Frederic Chopin's Mazurka Op. 50, No. 3 expresses the nineteenth-century notion of madness. My analysis of this particular Mazurka is preceded by a history of Chopin and propositions of his madness: that is, his tendencies toward melancholia, obsession, and nostalgia. Heavily emphasized in my argument is the suggestion that Chopin's music itself uniquely contradicts Romantic treatises of his time, thus supporting my assertion that his repertoire is ironic and contradictory to the reigning Romantic paradigm. This claim is supported by my comparing the accounts of George Sand to accounts of Frederick Niecks: what Niecks aestheticizes in Chopin's music, Sand situates within the reality of what the composer actually felt. Supported by the composer's own journals and a curiosity maintained in modern scholarship, I investigate the ways in which this Mazurka musically substantiates madness via the three aforementioned nineteenth-century phenomena. Greatly supported by case studies of leading nineteenth-century psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Jean-Étienne Esquirol, I contend that Chopin's personality expressed through his diaries may ultimately indicate a disabled person of the time - or, rather, one experiencing bouts of madness. Finally, by further referencing the peculiarities in Chopin's musical language as they contradict ideas brought forth by Gustav Schilling and Peter Lichtenthal, I argue Chopin's repertoire is ironically beautiful in its fracturing of Romantic beauty - not in its upholding of it.

 

Bio: Emily A. Travaline is a third-year PhD student at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research focuses primarily on nineteenth-century aesthetics, absurdist philosophy, and disability studies. She currently lectures at Baruch College in New York City.

 

The Not-So-Secrets of True Womanhood: Performing Liza Lehmann’s Secrets of the Heart

Lindsay Campbell (Graduate Center, City University of New York)

Liza Lehmann wrote more than 300 works across many genres, yet studies of her repertoire remain few and far between. While previous scholars have drawn attention primarily to her songs and song cycles, Lehmann’s stage works offer a window into theatrical performance in Victorian England. My paper analyzes the intersection of gender and the body in Lehmann’s 1895 The Secrets of the Heart, a fully staged scene chalk full of feminized characteristics particularly ripe for a gendered embodied analysis. Locating the site of analysis in my own performance of the scene, my research foregrounds the singers’ experiences, interactions with each other, and with Lehmann via the score, by drawing on recorded rehearsals and interviews, a method inspired by Elisabeth LeGuin’s Boccherini’s Body. I argue that The Secrets of the Heart is so entrenched in Victorian values, that following the instructions of the libretto, and particularly the score, necessitated an embodiment of ‘True Womanhood’ through gendered bodily techniques. Simultaneously, I highlight the ways in which my collaborator and I pushed back against ‘True Womanhood’ with our own 21st-century gender performance. My embodied analysis of The Secrets of the Heart not only draws attention to a little-studied composer and scene, but also demonstrates the ways such analyses can enrich discussions of pieces for which only a score survives.

Bio:

Lindsay Campbell is a musicologist, choral educator, and singer currently pursuing a PhD in Musicology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.  Her research focuses on British and American women song composers at the turn of the 20th century. Before beginning her studies at The Graduate Center, Lindsay taught choir in the Michigan public schools for six years. She holds an MM in choral conducting and a BM in music education and vocal performance from Michigan State University.  Always a performer at heart, Lindsay incorporates performance into her research, seeking out rarely performed or unrecorded works to study, record, and share with the world.

 Between Tempest and Poetry: A Performative Interpretation of Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2

Edy Rapika Panjaitan (Ohio University)

 Frédéric Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 31 (1837) stands as one of the composer’s most celebrated large-scale piano works, a piece in which drama and lyricism coalesce into a uniquely Chopinian aesthetic. Unlike the style brillant of his earlier period, this Scherzo embodies what might be called “dynamic romanticism”: muscular, tempestuous gestures juxtaposed with passages of poetic intimacy. Its Beethovenian opening, structured in reprise form yet constantly straining against formal boundaries, sets into motion a drama of unprecedented intensity. The work’s harmonic richness, motivic transformation, and rhythmic propulsion continually destabilize expectation, culminating in a resolution not in the tonic but in the luminous relative key of D-flat major.

The central trio, in D-flat major, transports listeners into an Arcadian world of lyricism. It unfolds in three distinct guises: first as a bucolic sicilienne, then as a waltz-like polyphony with four voices singing simultaneously, and finally as a ritornel dance. This idyllic vision is ultimately shattered as Chopin transforms pastoral lyricism into passionate agitation. The coda crowns the work with unbridled energy, reaffirming its stature as a masterpiece of Romantic pianism. In this lecture-performance, I will explore the musicological and aesthetic dimensions of the Scherzo no 2 while demonstrating interpretive strategies at the keyboard.

​​Edy is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Interdisciplinary Arts (Artist-Scholar Track) at Ohio University, where he studies piano under Professor Christopher Fisher and conducts research with Professor Garret Field. Edy received a Student Enhancement Award from Ohio University to conduct ethnographic research in Samosir Island, North Sumatera, Indonesia. He is working on dissertation research in Southeast Asian studies, with a focus on the music and life cycle rituals of the Toba Batak people of North Sumatra, Indonesia.