AMSGNY Meetings

Fall 2011 Meeting
October 29, 2011
Church for All Nations
417 West 57th Street
(between 9th and 10th Avenues)


SESSION I: PERFORMANCE TRADITIONS
11:00AM-12:30PM
Challenging a Deep-Seated Performance Tradition: Bach’s Ciaccona for Unaccompanied Violin
Raymond Erickson
assisted by Mikyung Kim, violin
So klingt Wien: Conductors, Orchestras, and Vibrato in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries
David Hurwitz
The Mustel Art Harmonium: A Performance Primer
Artis Wodehouse

KEYNOTE SPEAKER
12:45PM-1:45PM
Ornaments, Fingerings, and Authorship:
Persistent Questions About English Keyboard Music circa 1600
David Schulenberg

SESSION II: VERDI
2:00PM-3:00PM
Giuseppe Verdi, Giovanni Bottesini, and the Nineteenth-Century Double Bass
Kirsten Paige
Revising the Supernatural: Exploring Verdi’s Use of Dramatic-Tonal Association in his Two Macbeths
Steven Tietjen


SESSION III: 20TH-CENTURY PERFORMANCE PRACTICE
3:15PM-4:45PM
Reading Scarbo: Orchestration and Performativity
Andrew Chung
The Expression Parameter in Performing the Music of Gubaidulina
Philip Ewell
The Blues Idiom and Blues Performance Practices in Louis Armstrong’s Early Recordings
William Bauer

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Challenging a Deep-Seated Performance Tradition: Bach’s Ciaccona for Unaccompanied Violin
Raymond Erickson

Lukas Foss once remarked that tradition was like home: we love it but at some point we have to leave it. This presentation, therefore, challenges the comfort of the traditional approach to one of the most iconic of musical artworks--Bach's great "Ciaccona" for solo violin--demonstrating how modern musicological research and the new discipline of dance history lead us to an understanding of the work radically different from hallowed tradition, and hence to a radically different way of performing it.

So klingt Wien: Conductors, Orchestras, and Vibrato in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries
David Hurwitz

There are two competing theories of vibrato usage in late 19th and early 20th century orchestras coming from the historical performance movement. Roger Norrington contends that pitch vibrato in string ensemble playing was largely absent and not used in the modern, “continuous” manner until the late 1930s and early 1940s. He cites as evidence Bruno Walter’s 1938 recording of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic. Nikolaus Harnoncourt, on the other hand, holds that the presence of vibrato in the romantic orchestra was significant. Both artists cannot be right.

The Mustel Art Harmonium: A Performance Primer
Artis Wodehouse

The Art Harmonium, developed mainly in France during the 19th C. combines performance capabilities of both the organ and the piano, with an additional ability to quickly swell and diminish on a single note, much like a singer. Artis Wodehouse will show how this unique combination of expressive capabilities can be deployed to develop a performance on the instrument.

Ornaments, Fingerings, and Authorship:
Persistent Questions About English Keyboard Music circa 1600
David Schulenberg

This presentation examines recurring problems of sources and performance practice in English keyboard music from the years around 1600, including issues of attribution, fingering, and the interpretation of ornament signs. Focusing on three works—William Byrd's keyboard setting of John Dowland's Lachrimae Pavan; a fragmentary prelude by Emanuel Soncino; and a keyboard intabulation of Marenzio's madrigal “Ecco l'aurora” attributed to Peter Philips—I argue for applying a broader range of documentary evidence to the performance of this repertory than has previously been considered.

Giuseppe Verdi, Giovanni Bottesini, and the Ninettenth-Century Double Bass
Kirsten Paige

Considerable tension existed among nineteenth-century double bassists regarding the tuning system and number of strings they were to utilize during their orchestral playing. Because various tuning systems and numbers of strings were utilized on double basses with no standardization, music performed in some regions was unplayable in others. By the end of the nineteenth-century, the tension had evaporated as double bassists across Europe were forced to adapt to four-string double basses tuned to EADG and grew comfortable with this system. Nonetheless, even as European double bassists united around a common tuning system and arrangement of strings, Italy staunchly persisted as the only outpost of a bygone three-string tradition. Giuseppe Verdi played a hitherto little understood role in ameliorating this tension, mediated by Giovanni Bottesini, Italy’s greatest double bass virtuoso. Bottesini acted as a mediator between trenchant Italian double bassists who clung to traditions associated with playing three-string double basses, and Verdi who, by the end of the nineteenth-century, had written a double bass solo in his opera Otello that required all the Italian double bassists who premiered the work to utilize four-string instruments. This paper provides fresh insight into this collaboration, arguing that it was Bottesini’s mediations that catalyzed the eventual elimination of inconsistencies in orchestration methods for the double bass utilized by Italian composers until that time (as opposed to those of composers elsewhere in Europe) and that transformed the future of orchestral double bass writing and thus its sonority within the orchestra.

Revising the Supernatural: Exploring Verdi’s Use of Dramatic-Tonal Association in his Two Macbeths
Steven Tietjen

Verdi’s two Macbeths do not tell radically different stories nor do they contain radically different music, with a few exceptions, despite the eighteen years that separate them. Shakespeare’s tragedy is outlined faithfully in both versions, but they differ in how certain characters, namely Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, and the witches, function within the drama. In the first version, the focus if largely on Macbeth, whereas in the revision, Lady Macbeth and the witches drive the action. In that sense they are indeed two different dramatic works that. The 1865 revision is the version that most opera houses today present but an awareness of the original version and the dramatic influence of the changes that Verdi made will be helpful to directors, singers, and conductors alike in understanding the opera as a whole.

Reading Scarbo: Orchestration and Performativity
Andrew Chung

This paper examines Marius Constant's little-known orchestration of Ravel's Scarbo from Gaspard de la Nuit. From the vantage point of Iser's reader-response theory I examine how the work of transcription/orchestration can be seen to be ontologically similar to the work that performers do in that both transcribers/orchestrators and concert artists start their tasks by reading scores as texts. If Iser 's theories are to be believed, and texts (including musical scores) present us with vast fields of potentially realizable meanings which are unlocked by individual readers, what more can Constant's choices as an orchestrator tell us about Scarbo if we have come to know the piece from its solo piano version?

The Expression Parameter in Performing the Music of Gubaidulina
Philip Ewell

The music of Sofia Gubaidulina (b. 1931) is powerful yet serene, enigmatic yet familiar. This highly spiritual Russian composer has wowed audiences around the world with her unique sounds, inspired by folk idioms and religious texts. Though her compositions are widely performed, little analytic work has been done on her music. Roughly twenty years ago her good friend and colleague, Valentina Kholopova, devised a system for analyzing Gubaidulina’s music in order to aid in performance. Kholopova has shown that, unbeknown to the composer, Gubaidulina usually groups together five expression parameters (EP): Articulation and Methods of Pitch Derivation; Melody; Rhythm; Texture; and Compositional Writing. Further, each of these parameters can exist in one of two functions: as a consonant EP or a dissonant EP. The grouping of these EPs is crucial to understanding this music, and to pulling off a convincing performance. I will seek to do this by looking at her 10 Preludes for Cello Solo.

The Blues Idiom and Blues Performance Practices in Louis Armstrong’s Early Recordings
William Bauer

This study examines several sound recordings and transcriptions of instrumental and vocal performances from Louis Armstrong’s early career in light of oral-formulaic theory. Several of the recordings considered here have gone relatively unnoticed, in part because Armstrong scholarship has focused more attention on solos that anticipate later developments than on those that sustain continuity with earlier styles. The presentation will feature an in-depth analysis of one performance in particular, “I’m Not Rough,” recorded for OKeh records in December 1927. Based on the twelve-bar blues form, “I’m Not Rough” features the polyphonic textures characteristic of early jazz, with the musicians reveling in the complementary interplay between parts. The recording raises some questions about early jazz performance practice, in part because the musicians had worked out several aspects of the arrangement in advance. Specifically, the musicians’ use of quotation and melodic paraphrase, as well as their reliance on stock phrases or licks, challenges received notions about improvisation. The copyright deposit of the lead line also raises questions about the use of music notation in early jazz.