Winter Meeting, February 3rd, 2024 at Columbia University--schedule, program, abstracts and bios
0 Comments Published by AMSGNY President on Tuesday, January 2, 2024 at 2:18 PM.
Session I 10 AM to 11 AM
Music from Vienna
Why Transcribe Mahler’s Welte-Mignon Piano Rolls?
Artis Wodehouse (Woodside, NY)
Four Young Men of Vienna Celebrate Divine Fulfillment of a Vow
William E Hettrick (Hofstra University)
Session II 11 AM to 12 noon
Two Keyboards are Better than One
“It Takes Two”: Analyzing and Contextualizing Stephen Sondheim’s Concertino for Two Pianos
Poe M. Allphin (CUNY Graduate Center)
Sentential Ritornello Models and their Application to the First Movement of J.S. Bach’s Concerto for Two Harpsichords in C major (BWV 1061)
Vlad Praskurnin (CUNY Graduate Center)
Lunch 12 to 12:45
Session III 12:45 to 1:45
Tracking Influence
Sixteenth-Century Instrumentalists as Artisans and Intellectuals
Lynette Bowring (Yale School of Music)
The Water King: An Earlier English Erlkönig
Lindsay Campbell (CUNY Graduate Center)
Session IV 1:45-2:45
Transmission of Musical Ideas
Specters of Mahler: Media, Mediums, and the Transmission of Schoenberg to the United States
Benjamin P. Skoronski (Cornell University)
The Case of the Missing High D, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Failure
Danielle Buonaiuto (CUNY Graduate Center)
ABSTRACTS AND BIOS
“It Takes Two”: Analyzing
and Contextualizing Stephen Sondheim’s Concertino for Two Pianos
Poe M. Allphin (CUNY Graduate Center)
In a New York
Times article titled “Why You’ll Probably Never Hear A Sondheim
Concerto,” Anthony Tommasini asked Stephen Sondheim why he “[had] never
composed an instrumental piece,” to which he replied that he did so in college
with a piano sonata and a violin sonata. Shortly after graduating from Williams
College, and just before studying theory and composition with Milton Babbitt,
Sondheim also wrote a double piano concertino. Tommasini’s 2016 framing implies
that Sondheim left the promise of a career in serious instrumental music to
pursue a more frivolous career in musical theatre –– a suggestion that
simultaneously minimizes the impact of Sondheim on Broadway by positioning
classical music as superior while also neglecting to imagine the ways in which
Sondheim’s classical training and musical theatre training were intertwined and
the effects that these each have had on his later music. Sondheim’s 1950 Concertino
for Two Pianos provides an interesting framework for examining his
early influences and his studies through the end of his time at Williams as
well as a stepping stone from which to trace these early roots and his work
with Milton Babbitt forward through the many decades of his career that
followed.
Poe M. Allphin is a musicology PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center
and an adjunct instructor at Queens College. His research focuses on queer
musical communities in the U.S. from the 70s-90s. He works at the intersection
of queer/trans studies, disability studies, and music, using archives and
conducting oral histories. His academic and creative work has been published in
places including Transgender Studies Quarterly and the Anthology
of New Music: Trans & Nonbinary Voices.
Sentential Ritornello Models and their Application to the First
Movement
of J.S. Bach’s Concerto for Two
Harpsichords in C major (BWV 1061)
Vlad
Praskurnin Poe M. Allphin (CUNY Graduate
Center)
Laurence Dreyfus (1996) and Juan Mesa (2021) have fruitfully
applied sentential models to the opening ritornellos of J.S. Bach’s allegro
concerto movements, using the first movement of J.S. Bach’s Concerto for Two
Harpsichords in C major (BWV 1061) as an exemplar. For the music following this
movement’s opening ritornello, however, Dreyfus’s and Mesa’s atemporal
focuses on the subsequent presentation and development of ritornello
material minimize the joint contribution of ritornello and
non-ritornello material to the movement’s form.
By considering the formal function of both ritornello and
non-ritornello material, I argue that the sentential organization of the
opening ritornello section identified by Dreyfus and Mesa is reproduced in
each of this movement’s subsequent sections. Building on Joel Lester’s
(2001) observations that Bach’s large-scale movements are often
comprised of a succession of parallel sections, and further that in
ritornello forms, such parallel sections are inclusive of both ritornello and
non-ritornello material, I show that the movement consists of six parallel
sections, each of which is described by Mesa’s opening ritornello TESC
model (Tonic definition, Elaboration, Structural return preparation and
Cadence). I propose that Mesa’s T stage can itself support a nested TESC model,
and that his C stage can incorporate one or more optional pre-cadential
complexes, passages which prolong tonic, subdominant and/or dominant
harmonies before a nested C stage fulfilled by Mesa’s cadential complex.
The proposed understanding of Bach’s ritornello form complements
previous analytical perspectives by situating the local formal functions
of both ritornello and non-ritornello material within a section-level sentential
framework.
Vlad Praskurnin is a Ph.D. student in Music Theory at the CUNY
Graduate Center. His research interests span the 16th to 18th centuries, and
include schema theory, form, historical pedagogy and improvisation, among
others. He has presented his research at the joint AMS/SMT 2023 conference, the
2022 Galant Schema Studies conference, and conferences organized by the
Citations: Renaissance Imitation Mass (CRIM) Project. Involvement in the CRIM
Project resulted in a Master’s Thesis, supported by a SSHRC Canadian
Graduate Scholarship, on Orlando di Lasso’s Chanson-Masses. He earned M.A. and
B.Mus. degrees in Music Theory at McGill University.
Four Young Men of Vienna
Celebrate Divine Fulfillment of a Vow
William E Hettrick (Hofstra
University)
Austrian
Emperor Franz Joseph I (born 1830) was attacked by a knife-wielding assailant
on February 18, 1853, but he survived with only a minor wound. In thanks to God
for his deliverance, his younger brother, Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian (born
1832) vowed to erect a church in Vienna. It was to be known as the Votivkirche.
Heinrich Ferstel (born 1828) won the architectural competition with his
neo-gothic design. April 24, 1856, was chosen as the date of the
ceremonial Grundsteinlegung (laying of the foundation-stone)
in an area just outside the north-west section of the old city wall. The Wiener
Männergesang-Verein (founded in 1843) was invited to perform at the ceremony,
where the organization’s newly elected conductor, Johann Herbeck (born 1831),
would be making his public debut. Herbeck followed the custom of writing his
own music for the occasion, creating two works for men’s chorus and military
brass band, an ensemble suitable for outdoor performance. He worked at great
speed, composing, copying parts, and rehearsing his musical forces in only a
few days. Herbeck’s pieces are settings of sacred texts selected from Psalms 26
and 27 (Catholic numbering) and the Te Deum. He and his performers received an
appreciative response from the Archduke after the ceremony. The Votivkirche was
finally completed in 1879. Sadly, two of the four young men of Vienna did not
live to witness the event.
William E. Hettrick is Professor Emeritus of Hofstra University. His
research on Johann Herbeck (1831–1877) has produced five major volumes of
critical editions of choral music (A-R Editions) and the article “Johann
Herbeck’s Edition of Choral Works by Franz Schubert: History and Analysis” (Nineteenth-Century
Music Review, 2019). He is also the author of \The ‘Musica
instrumentalis deudsch’ of Martin Agricola: A Treatise on Musical Instruments,
1529 and 1545 (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and his recent The
American Piano Industry: Episodes in the History of a Great Enterprise (Pendragon
Press; Edwin Mellen Press).
Sixteenth-Century Instrumentalists as
Artisans and Intellectuals
Lynette Bowring (Yale University)
In the
recent flourishing of research on artisans during the early modern period, the
production of lasting material products and the presence of formal guild
structures have featured strongly. The ephemeral output and less regulated
workers of the performative arts have proved more challenging to incorporate
into a framework of artisanal production, and subfields such as music have not
been integrated into broader research on artisanal cultures. In this paper, I
reconsider the potential connections between musical practices and research on
more traditional artisanal occupations, drawing particularly upon examples from
Italian instrumentalists of the early to mid-sixteenth century. The childhood
music education of Benvenuto Cellini and the activities and self-positioning of
the civic instrumentalists of Brescia demonstrate many commonalities with
artisanal cultures, yet they also reveal elements of intellectual and artistic
aspiration. Given that music during this period could be variously viewed on a
continuum that stretched from the heavenly spheres all the way down to the most
disadvantaged street musician, I argue that the close yet slightly
uncomfortable alignment with traditional artisanal practices speaks to the
challenges inherent in classifying artistic activities and outputs, as well as
to gradual transformations in status that instrumentalists were encountering
during this period.
Lynette
Bowring is Assistant Professor of Music History at the Yale School of
Music; she previously taught at the Juilliard School, Rutgers University, and
Westminster Choir College. She earned her PhD in musicology from Rutgers
University in 2017. Her research interests focus around literacy and education
for musicians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; she is
currently working toward a book proposal on the topic. She has coedited an
essay collection with Rebecca Cypess and Liza Malamut, Music and Jewish
Culture in Early Modern Italy, and is awaiting the publication of an
edition of motets by Marianna Martines.
Specters
of Mahler: Media, Mediums, and the Transmission of Schoenberg to the United
States
Benjamin P. Skoronski (Cornell University)
Mahler was dead, to begin with. His ghost haunts a 1911
song recital in which American soprano Alma Gluck sings two of his
Rückert-Lieder followed by the U.S. premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s
“Waldsonne.” This recital provides an avenue for reflection upon the mediatic
nature of musical transmission. Scholarly narratives of the transmission of
music are primarily concerned with the question of influence, erasing the
agents that initiate musical migration. In this article I consider the mediatic
agencies at work in the transmission of Schoenberg to the U.S. I call into
question the anthropocentric division between the human and media, suggesting
that human agents are no less mediatic than their technological cousins. I
consider these questions through Alma Gluck’s 1911 U.S. premiere of
Schoenberg’s “Waldsonne,” arguing that Mahler transmitted the work of
Schoenberg to Gluck, functioning as a mediatic agency that remains agential
after death.
Mahler takes on the valiance of Sybille Krämer’s messenger,
the mediatic agent that
transmits
a message from sender to receiver while dying in the process (Krämer
2015). Gluck premieres “Waldsonne” at a recital memorializing the
late Mahler, also singing two of his own Rückert-Lieder that address death and
transcendent bliss from a first-person perspective. As such Gluck serves as
Jeffrey Sconce’s spiritualist medium, through whom the ghostly Mahler speaks of
his death and afterlife in a public séance (Sconce 2000). This spiritualist
metaphor extends to Gluck’s premiere of “Waldsonne” as well, as Mahler
continues to act as a transmitter of Schoenberg’s music from beyond the grave.
By employing Krämer’s and Sconce’s anthropomorphic models of media I
demonstrate how to conceive of human agents as mediators within a flat
ontology. I suggest that the transmission of music always takes place within a
web of mediatic agencies and events—material and immaterial, human and
nonhuman, living and dead.
Benjamin P. Skoronski
(he/him) is a second-year Ph.D. student of Music and Sound Studies at Cornell
University. His research interests include 20th-century modernisms, media
theory, organology, and music historiography. He has presented his work at
numerous conferences, ranging from regional (various AMS chapter meetings) to
national (SAM 2022) to international (IMS 2022). Prior to beginning his
doctoral studies at Cornell, Skoronski taught as a lecturer at the University
of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music.
The Case of the Missing
High D, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Failure
Danielle
Buonaiuto (CUNY Graduate Center)
The soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson, a frequent and feted
interpreter of contemporary music from 1965-2005, made the premiere recording
of Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol with Pierre Boulez
and the Cleveland Orchestra in 1990. In a recent interview, Phyllis explained
to me why her final climactic high D in the Nightingale’s “Chanson” doesn’t
sound: at the time, Howard Hartog, the beloved manager that she and Boulez had
shared for many years, was dying. In this presentation, I explore through an
autoethnographic and performance-based narrative what a feminist, compassionate
analysis might bring to the question of the “missing” high D. Re-evaluating
assumptions of what constitutes a “successful performance,” I ask what else
might be revealed about the function of social relationships in musicking, by
an analysis of this performance and its moment of vocal failure. I confront the
attendant issues that come to light: hegemonic forms of knowledge, and the
gendered dimensions thereof; the importance of performance and performance
analysis to a fulsome understanding of contemporary vocal music and its makers;
and the affective dimension of collaboration. Using Sedgwick’s theory of
paranoid vs reparative reading, Will Cheng’s ideas about “justness” in musical
spaces, and a corpus of musicological work resting on embodied forms of
analysis, I contextualize my extensive archival research on Phyllis Bryn-Julson
and her contemporaries, including a series of interviews. Considering affection
as a dimension of professional relationships in the mid-century avant-garde
reveals an urgency to foreground the humanity of musical actors, living and
dead, in the moment of collaboration, as well as in our historicizations,
attending to our intimate histories as carefully as our canonical.
Danielle Buonaiuto (she/they/any)
is a PhD student in Musicology at CUNY, The Graduate Center, and a professional
opera singer. She maintains an active solo career, and is particularly sought
after for world premieres; her most recent projects were Pomegranate (Canadian
Opera Company) and RUR: A Torrent of Light (Tapestry Opera),
both in her hometown of Toronto. She also sings in the Extra Chorus of the
Metropolitan Opera and the Berwick Chorus of the Oregon Bach Festival.
Danielle’s scholarly work is deeply informed by her experiences in the field;
she is interested leveraging queer theory, feminist frameworks, and field and
archival research to critique systems of inequity on stages and in boardrooms
of opera and vocal music. She is currently undertaking an extensive archival
project to assist Phyllis Bryn-Julson in completing her memoir, which will be
an important contribution to current perspectives on the American and European
avant-garde from 1970-2000.
The Water King: An Earlier English Erlkönig
Lindsay Campbell Poe M. Allphin (CUNY Graduate Center)
Personifying a story’s imagery through the piano in nineteenth century
art song has fascinated musicologists and theorists alike, with scholars like
Susan Youens and Christopher Gibbs highlighting such techniques within Franz
Schubert’s Lieder. As the field of musicology continues to expand its knowledge
of women composers and their musical output, it is imperative to place women’s
achievements within the narrative of art song scholarship. Focusing on the
development of symbolic keyboarding techniques, my research highlights women’s
compositional accomplishments in art song. My paper examines one work of
composer Harriet Wainewright, “The Water King,” a ballad for five voices. Using
the framework Richard Leppert provides in The Sight of Sound: Music,
Representation, and the History of the Body, I will discuss
Wainewright’s racial and political positionality as an English woman living in
Kolkata, India and her collection of songs written during her time there, with
particular attention paid to the final work of the collection. I juxtapose the
compositional techniques used by Wainewright in her 1811 setting of “The Water
King” with those used in Franz Schubert’s 1815 “Erlkönig” in order to challenge
the historical narrative surrounding the role of the piano in art song. By
exploring the composer Harriet Wainewright, I argue that the compositional
techniques, especially the keyboard’s function, used in her ballad, “The Water
King,” parallel and predate those popularized by Schubert in “Erlkönig” four
years later. In conclusion, this project sheds light on women’s historically
neglected achievements in the compositional evolution of the art song genre by
closely examining Wainewright’s “The Water King.”
Lindsay Campbell is a PhD student in Musicology at the Graduate Center, City
University of New York. Her scholarly interests include German and
English art song, women composers, and gender studies. Originally from
Michigan, she holds bachelors’ degrees in Music Education and Vocal
Performance, and a master’s degree in Choral Conducting from Michigan State
University. Prior to her time at CUNY, Lindsay taught middle school and
high school choir for six years in Michigan public schools.
Why
Transcribe Mahler’s Welte-Mignon Piano Rolls?
Artis Wodehouse
In 1905 Mahler recorded four piano renditions of selections
from his orchestral/vocal music on piano roll for the Welte-Mignon. They are
particularly valuable since the Welte-Mignon method for performance capture —
and lack of invasive post-production editing — can be
trusted to give some representation of Mahler’s actual performance. Wodehouse
is currently collaborating with Dr. Peter Phillips, researcher/expert in the
conversion of Welte piano roll data to the digital domain, and Bill Ooms,
transcriber of Mahler’s Welte-Mignon MIDI data as formulated by Dr. Phillips.
The presentation will give an overview of their work to date as well as
Wodehouse’s goal of creating a print edition encompassing both a readable score
and extensive commentary on Mahler’s deeply embedded late 19th C. performance
practice. The presentation will touch on the core issues of transcription of
Mahler’s live performance captured on roll — what a score can or should depict,
and the relationship between Mahler’s roll performance to his published scores
of same. A sound recording and two print scores of the
Mahler rolls will be used for the presentation. Wodehouse will illustrate some
salient aspects of Mahler’s performance practice on the piano available at the
meeting site.
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. Her
best-seller, “Gershwin Plays Gershwin”, on the Nonesuch label has sold over
500,000 copies. Beginning in 2000, Wodehouse began performing on a
representative group of antique reed organs, harmoniums and antique pianos that
she had restored and brought to concert condition. Her recording "Arthur
Bird Music for the American Harmonium" was released in 2016 on the Raven
label. Wodehouse has a BM from the Manhattan School of Music, an MM from Yale,
and a DMA from Stanford.
Fall Meeting--September 30, 2023
0 Comments Published by AMSGNY President on Tuesday, September 5, 2023 at 1:20 PM.
The Fall 2023 meeting of the AMSGNY will take place on
Saturday, September 30th. It
will take place at Wagner College on Staten Island. Travel directions may be found here: https://wagner.edu/about/visit/ We will be meeting in Campus Hall, which is
#1 on the campus map: https://wagner.edu/about/visit/campus-map/
The schedule follows.
The presentations are arranged so that the subject matter is chronological.
11AM-12 Noon Session 1
Schulz, Kirnberger, and J. S. Bach’s Bm Fugue: A
reassessment of BWV 869 as found in Die wahren Grundsätze zum Gebrauch der Harmonie.
Miguel Campinho (Wagner College)
Reevaluating
Lakme
Jeff S.
Dailey (AMSGNY)
12-12:15 Break
12:15-1:15 Session 2
Specters of Mahler:
Media, Mediums, and the Transmission of Schoenberg to the United States Benjamin
P. Skoronski (Cornell University)
Between
Human and Machine in Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de maese Pedro
Sylvia
Kahan (CUNY Graduate Center and College
of Staten Island)
1:15-1:45 Lunch
1:45- 2 Commemoration of Dr. Isabelle Cazeaux, including selections from Durufle's Requiem, performed by the Wagner College Choir
2-3 PM Session
3
The Self-Effacing Film Scorer No More: Three
Examples of Film Composers' Interactions with a Larger Public
Jonathan
Waxman (NYU and Hofstra University)
Musicology in the 2020 Ninth Circuit en banc Led
Zeppelin Decision
Lawrence Ferrara (New York University)
ABSTRACTS AND BIOS
Schulz, Kirnberger, and J. S. Bach’s Bm
Fugue: A reassessment of BWV 869 as found in Die wahren Grundsätze zum Gebrauch der Harmonie.
Miguel Campinho (Wagner College)
Johann Abraham Peter Schulz (1747-1800)
published, in 1773, what amounts to one of the earliest harmonic analysis of a
musical composition, and the object was the last fugue of Johann Sebastian
Bach’s Das
Wohltemperierte Klavier, Teil I: BVW 869 in B minor. This was however published
under the name of his mentor, Johann Philipp Kirnberger (1721-83), and meant as
a synthesis of the latter’s thoughts on harmony as expounded in his then recent Die Kunst des
reinen Satzes in der Musik. Kirnberger did at one point study under J. S.
Bach, and Schulz’s work carries at least the responsibility inherent to such an
association.
In
his dissertation on Kirnberger, David Beach points out Schulz’s
‘misinterpretations’ of Bach’s fugue. Joel Lester, in his survey of
eighteenth-century music theory, also presents this analysis pointing to the
limitations of Kirnberger’s approach.
Looking
into Bach’s writings on thoroughbass, and studying carefully Schulz’s analysis
both in light of current scholarship on Bach’s teaching methods—and
also current research on broader teaching approaches in the eighteenth century,
such as partimenti—I present Schulz’s work in a different light, showing him
more in accord with Bach and eighteenth-century harmonic thought than his critics
give him credit for.
Bio:
Miguel
Campinho teaches Music Theory at Wagner College. He has published the
chronological catalogue of solo piano works by Portuguese composer-pianist
Óscar da Silva (1870–1958). He has also published the first critical editions
of Óscar da Silva's Fantasia for solo piano and the Sonata Saudade for violin and piano. He has presented about Óscar da
Silva's music at the American Liszt Society Festival and at the European Piano
Teachers Association Conference. As a pianist, Campinho has recorded the
complete sonatas and sonatinas of Portuguese composer-pianist Eurico Tomás de
Lima (1908–1989), available on all major streaming platforms. Miguel Campinho
holds a DMA in piano performance from The Hartt School (University of Hartford).
He previously taught at the Butler School of Music, University of Texas at
Austin.
Reevaluating
Lakme
Jeff S.
Dailey (AMSGNY)
One of the most famous French operas
of the 19th century, Lakme remains the best known vocal work by Leo
Delibes. Once frequently performed, it is not heard as often as it used
to. In the 21st century, it is time to reevaluate this work in the light
of current theories and also to examine its impact on popular culture
worldwide, which includes film, television, video games, and cosmetics.
By analyzing the score and the libretto, it is possible to place the opera on
the continuum of artistic creation that started with the first exposure of the
Indian subcontinent to Europeans. As with many other 19th century operas,
Lakme's score contains much for contemporary audiences to admire.
Bio:
Jeff S.
Dailey is the President of the Greater New York Chapter of the American
Musicological Society. Now retired from a decades-long career in
administration, he devotes his time to musical and theatrical projects he did
not have time for when he was working. He has recently given several
lectures on Himalayan organology at the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art
on Staten Island. His research on Lakme
was conducted so that he could prepare an introduction to the reprinted edition
of the original orchestral score, which should be available later this
year. As the founder and artistic director of the musical ensemble
Collectio Musicorum, he has prepared their upcoming performances of music from
Shakespeare's First Folio, in commemoration of the book's 400th anniversary,
and recordings of music by the 19th Italian composer/conductor Giacomo Panizza,
which should be available in 2024.
A proud
graduate of Wagner College, he has, since the beginning of this year, overseen
the creation of an online archive of music by the Wagner College Collegium
Musicum and its director, Dr. Ronald Cross. Over 100 hours of recorded
music are now available on the website https://collegiummusicumwagneriensis.com/.
Dr.
Dailey retired as Director of Fine and Performing Arts in the Deer Park School
District in Suffolk County. Under his
direction, the district was routinely named as One of the Best Communities for
Music Education in the United States by the NAMM Foundation. He also founded the Long Island Student
Shakespeare Festival, where, over the six years of the festival’s existence,
over 1000 students had the opportunity to learn about and perform
Shakespeare. He also taught at St. John’s
University on Staten Island (five years), The College of Staten Island (four
years) and Five Towns College (seventeen years). His published work includes studies of
Gilbert and Sullivan, Kurt Weill, Gaetano Donizetti, John Donne, Beowulf,
and Eugene O’Neill. He earned his Ph.D.
at New York University, and his dissertation, on Sullivan’s Ivanhoe, was
awarded the prize for Best Dissertation in Opera by the National Opera Association. Since retiring, Dr. Dailey has put his two
seminary degrees to use by serving as pastor at All Nations Lutheran Church in
Manhattan and Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in New Rochelle.
Specters of Mahler:
Media, Mediums, and the Transmission of Schoenberg to the United States Benjamin
P. Skoronski (Cornell University)
Mahler
was dead, to begin with. His ghost haunts a 1911 song recital in which American
soprano Alma Gluck sings two of his Rückert-Lieder followed by the U.S.
premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s “Waldsonne.” This recital provides an avenue
for reflection upon the mediatic nature of musical transmission. Scholarly
narratives of the transmission of music are primarily concerned with the
question of influence, erasing the agents that initiate musical migration. In
this article I consider the mediatic agencies at work in the transmission of
Schoenberg to the U.S. I call into question the anthropocentric division between
the human and media, suggesting that human agents are no less mediatic than their
technological cousins. I consider these questions through Alma Gluck’s 1911
U.S.
premiere of
Schoenberg’s “Waldsonne,” arguing that Mahler transmitted the work of Schoenberg
to Gluck, functioning as a mediatic agency that remains agential after death.
Mahler
takes on the valiance of Sybille Krämer’s messenger, the mediatic agent that
transmits a
message from sender to receiver while dying in the process (Krämer 2015). Gluck premieres “Waldsonne” at a recital
memorializing the late Mahler, also singing two of his own Rückert-Lieder that
address death and transcendent bliss from a first-person perspective. As such
Gluck serves as Jeffrey Sconce’s spiritualist medium, through whom the ghostly
Mahler speaks of his death and afterlife in a public séance (Sconce 2000). This
spiritualist metaphor extends to Gluck’s premiere of “Waldsonne” as well, as
Mahler continues to act as a transmitter of Schoenberg’s music from beyond the
grave. By
employing
Krämer’s and Sconce’s anthropomorphic models of media I demonstrate how to conceive
of human agents as mediators within a flat ontology. I suggest that the transmission
of music always takes place within a web of mediatic agencies and events—material
and immaterial, human and nonhuman, living and dead.
Bio:
Benjamin P. Skoronski (he/him)
is a Ph.D. student of Music and Sound Studies (formerly known as
“Musicology”) at Cornell University. His interests include 20th-century
modernisms, deadness, the avant-garde, spiritualism, and theorizing the
archive. Skoronski is also interested in overarching questions addressing the
position of musicology as a discipline within academic discourse and the
contemporary world: the crisis of the humanities, the deconstruction of
the concept of "music," and the future of music studies. Prior to
beginning his doctoral studies at Cornell, Skoronski taught as a lecturer at
the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music.
Between
Human and Machine in Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de maese Pedro
Sylvia
Kahan (CUNY Graduate Center and College
of Staten Island)
June 25, 2023
marked the centenary of the first performance of Manuel de Falla’s El
retablo de maese Pedro in the Paris music salon of the Princesse Edmond de
Polignac, who commissioned the work and to whom it is dedicated. Based on
episodes from Cervantes’s Don Quixote, El retablo is scored for
three voices, chamber orchestra and harpsichord and is “acted” by both
life-sized marionettes and hand puppets. It enjoyed an immediate success:
within a few years of its premiere, it was performed all over Europe, both in
its original form and in redesigned productions.
Of the work, the
composer wrote to the Princesse, “It represents, perhaps, among my
compositions, the one to which I have given my greatest sense of fantasy” [celui
où j’ai mis plus d’illusion]. The complex production details of this
elaborate play-within-a-play include having the dramatic action enacted
entirely by marionettes and hand puppets and situating the work’s three singers
offstage among the members of the chamber orchestra. These innovative creative
choices have been discussed elsewhere (see, for example, Juan Miermont-Beaure,
2003). Likewise, the composer’s decision to adopt the austere and refined style
of Castilian music in order to evoke the time and place of Cervantes’
masterwork, has been amply discussed in the scholarly literature (see, for
example, Michael Christoforides, 2002; Carol A. Hess, 2001 and 2005).
My aim to shed
light on a little-examined aspect of El retablo: the compositional
decisions that Falla made in his scoring to accommodate both the movements of
the life-sized marionettes and the hand puppets. I will discuss the ways the
percussion and harpsichord evoke mechanization in the music and the inclusion
of many unmetered, recitativo-like passages that enable flexibility in
the timing of the marionettes’ movements. The “disembodied” voices of the vocal
soloists, hidden among the instrumentalists, and the extravagantly virtuosic
nature of the instrumental solos creates a fascinating tension with the angular
movements of the non-human “actors”. My analyses of the musical settings for
the puppets and marionettes will video excerpts of productions of El retablo,
including a 2002 New York performance by puppeteer Basil Twist and the Eos
Orchestra.
Bio:
Sylvia Kahan is Professor of Music at The Graduate Center and College of
Staten Island, City University of New York, where she is a member of both the
Piano and Musicology faculties. She has performed as concerto
soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician in concert venues and festivals
throughout North America and Europe. She has participated in the Tanglewood, Aspen, Waterloo, Delta, and
Nancy festivals. As a collaborative pianist, she has partnered
world-renowned vocal artists including Dame Felicity Lott, François Le Roux,
the late Roberta Peters and Shirley Verrett, and members of the New York
Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and the Emerson and Ysaÿe
String Quartets.
As a musicologist, Sylvia Kahan specializes
in 19th- and 20th-century French music and culture. Her publications include
studies of Nadia Boulanger and the Polignac family, press coverage of chamber
performances in the nineteenth century, Debussy reception in America, Fauré’s
French and British patrons, Prokofiev in Paris, Varèse in New York, newspaper
coverage of the Paris World’s Fairs, women as patrons of music and art, and the
history of octatonicism. She is the author of Music’s Modern Muse and In
Search of New Scales, both published by University of Rochester
Press). Her 2018 Winnaretta
Singer Polignac: Princesse, mécène et musicienne (Les presses
du réel, Dijon) was the inaugural First-Prize winner of Parité Assurance’s Prix
Littéraire and was a runner-up for the Prix France Musique des Muses. She is
currently working on a book on Marie-Blanche de Polignac. Sylvia Kahan is past
president of the American Musicological Society-Greater New York Chapter.
The Self-Effacing Film Scorer No More: Three
Examples of Film Composers' Interactions with a Larger Public
Jonathan
Waxman (NYU and Hofstra University)
As film scoring has become a
more prominent compositional art, film composers have been promoted in a
variety of ways beyond just composing for films from creating suites of their
music, giving commentaries on their scores for physical media and on-line, and
even receiving acknowledgment in the films themselves.
This paper will explore, with
representative examples, three different ways that film composers have been
credited beyond the scores they composed. The first example is Leonard
Bernstein creating an orchestral suite for his only film score On the
Waterfront (1954.) While other composers such as Steiner and Korngold have
created suites of their music, Bernstein was able to bring his suite to a
broader public through his platform as a conductor and educator. The second
example is composer commentaries which started with DVD audio tracks in the
late 1990s and have in recent years experienced a resurgence in the on-line
medium, allowing viewers to now see the composers analyze their music through
videos. The last example is composers recently being credited in the films
themselves with a notable recent case being John Williams’s small role as
"Oma Tres" in Rise of Skywalker (2019,) but also Tim Simonec being
credited as the composer of his piece “Upswingin’” in the film Whiplash (2014.)
Simonec became the first film composer mentioned specifically by name in a film
alongside his composition. All three of these examples show over the decades an
increasing public face to film scorers and their respective film compositions.
Bio:
Jonathan Waxman completed a
Ph.D. in historical musicology at New York University (GSAS) and a Bachelors of
Music in Piano Performance from New York University (Steinhardt.) He is
currently on the faculty at Hofstra University and NYU (Steinhardt) where he
teaches classes in music history and music theory as well as graduate seminars
in research methods and American music. He has recently published an article in
the collection _Nostalgia and Video Game Music_ on 8-bit chiptune adaptations
of film music scores and serves as Vice-President of the Greater New York
chapter of the American Musicological Society.
Musicology in the 2020 Ninth Circuit en banc Led
Zeppelin Decision
Lawrence Ferrara (New York University)
The
72-page, 11-judges 2020 Ninth Circuit en banc decision in the Led Zeppelin Stairway
to Heaven litigation upheld the result of the 2016 jury trial -- which
found that Stairway did not infringe the copyright of Plaintiff’s
song Taurus -- and has already had a significant impact on analysis of musicological
elements in copyright litigations by (1) establishing that musical works that
were registered with the U. S. Copyright Office before the implementation of
the 1976 Copyright Act are governed by the 1909 Copyright Act and thereby, the
sheet music deposit copy “defines the four corners” of the musical work, (2)
abrogating the “inverse ratio rule” which allowed courts to impose a lower
standard for infringement when a high degree of access existed, and (3)
qualifying the “selection and arrangement” of elements by finding Plaintiff
merely identified a “combination” of elements without explaining how those
elements are “particularly selected and arranged” which “amounts to nothing
more than trying to copyright commonplace elements.”
Each
of these findings will be explained using the piano, and audio clips and visual
exhibits that were used at trial.
Immediately
following the March 2020 en banc decision in Led Zeppellin and citing
that decision, (1) the judge in the Katy Perry “Dark Horse” trial [Gray v
Perry] dismissed the case, (2) the judge in Johannsongs vs. Lovland (regarding
Lovland’s “You Raise Me Up”) dismissed the case, (3) the judge in Smith vs.
The Weeknd dismissed the case, and (4) in the recent Ed Sheeran trial in Griffin
vs. Sheeran, Judge Stanton delimited Plaintiff’s 1973 song to the sheet
music deposit copy. Lawrence Ferrara was
the testifying musicologist for defendants in all four of these subsequent
cases as well as in Led Zeppelin.
Bio:
Lawrence
Ferrara is an author and a co-author of books as well as articles in
peer-reviewed journals on music theory and analysis, keyboard harmony and
improvisation, philosophy of music, research methodologies, and other areas
related to music. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book, Philosophy and the Analysis of Music: Bridges to Musical Sound,
Form and Reference.
At NYU, Dr. Ferrara has taught undergraduate and
graduate classes in music theory and analysis, music history, research methods
in music, keyboard harmony and improvisation, philosophy of music and the arts,
music performance practices, and music copyright. Dr. Ferrara was the Director
of Music Performance Programs, and from 1986-1995, Director of Doctoral (Ph.D.)
Studies in the Department of Music and Performing Arts. From 1995-2011, he was
Chair of the Department, in 2006 he was named Director of Steinhardt Music and
Performing Arts, and in 2011, he was named Director Emeritus, his ongoing
title. Dr. Ferrara is on the full-time faculty in music theory and music
history at NYU/Steinhardt.
Dr. Ferrara is currently a member of the Editorial
Board of the journal Music and
Moving Image (University of Illinois Press) and on the board
of Editorial Consultants for the journal Philosophy of
Music Education Review (Indiana University Press). Previously,
he was Associate Editor of the Journal of
Qualitative Evaluation in the Arts, and a member of the editorial
board for the New York University Education
Quarterly. He was a co-P.I. on federal and foundation grants for
research in performing arts medicine and Vice President and co-founder of a
non-profit federation of physicians and artists fostering research that bridges
the arts to medicine. Dr. Ferrara was a winner of a Presidential Fellowship and
the Daniel E. Griffiths Award for research, the latter regarding his writing
and research on Schopenhauer's philosophy of music (Cambridge University Press).
Dr. Ferrara is an active music
copyright consultant for record, music publishing and motion picture companies,
and individuals in the United States and abroad. He has given invited lectures on music
copyright litigations at Harvard University Law School in each of the last
thirteen years, at Columbia University Law School over a period of fifteen
years, at other law schools, and for companies (such as Netflix) and
organizations (such as The Los Angeles Copyright Society), and panel presentations for
numerous organizations (such as The Copyright Society of the United States).
Dr. Ferrara has also given several peer-reviewed presentations regarding music
copyright at meetings of the American Musicological Society GNY.
As
a music copyright consultant, Dr. Ferrara has provided musical analyses on
behalf of artists and/or composers in the United States, Canada, Europe,
Scandinavia, and Australia.