Fall 2014 Meeting "Unusual Music"
0 Comments Published by AMSGNY President on Friday, October 3, 2014 at 12:57 PM.
The Fall Meeting will take place on Saturday, October 18th at the Center for Remembering and Sharing, located at 123 Fourth Avenue in Manhattan. The Center is located on the second floor. It is just south of Union Square, between West 12th and 13th Streets.
The meeting will start promptly at noon. Come a little early for refreshments and socializing; we will also take a break during the meeting. There will be seven papers:
The meeting will start promptly at noon. Come a little early for refreshments and socializing; we will also take a break during the meeting. There will be seven papers:
Isabella
d’Este: Patronage, Performance, and the Viola da Gamba
Elizabeth
Weinfield
Isabella d'Este’s endorsement of the viola da gamba would substantially alter the
current of musical composition at the Italian court. This paper will discuss Isabella d’Este’s interdisciplinary patronage
alongside the rapidly changing musical climate of Mantua at the turn of the
sixteenth century, and shall reveal that the viola da gamba granted a great
patroness the means to perform through her collection.
“The Most Beautiful Lyrical Masterpiece of the
Eighteenth Century”: Antonio
Salieri’s Axur, re d’Ormus on the Warsaw Stage (1789-1825)
Anna Parkitna
Axur, re d’Ormus by Lorenzo da Ponte and Antonio Salieri (premiered in
Vienna on January 8, 1788) was one of the most successful operas presented at
the National Theater in Warsaw in the years 1789-1825. Introduced by the
Italian troupe of Domenico Guardasoni, the work soon became the favorite
adaptation in the repertoire of national singers. The success of the
Polish version generated excitement for the skill of the young national
opera, and was praised most enthusiastically in the writings of Wojciech
Bogusławski, the director and promoter of Polish opera. Bogusławski’s
fascination with the new mixed mode inspired him to name Axur,
re d’Ormus “the most beautiful lyrical masterpiece of the eighteenth
century.” His comments not only shed light on the success of the Polish
production, but also provide important evidence regarding the aesthetics of
mixed mode opera in the late-eighteenth century.
The Concerti of Boris Tchaikovsky
Louis Blois
In my talk today, I will focus on the three
instrumental concerti that Tchaikovsky wrote between 1964 and 1971, the Cello
Concerto, the Violin Concerto, and the Piano Concerto. They are of particular
interest in that they represent the outlying extremes to which Tchaikovsky
would take his mature idiom. They also take us into the core of the composer’s
musical thinking, and offer a glimpse of the essential characteristics of his
music.
Gustav Jenner and the
Music of Brahms: The Orchestral Serenades
Jacquelyn
Sholes
This paper provides
the first serious comparison of Gustav Jenner’s only complete orchestral piece,
his little-known Serenade in A major (1911-1912), with its most obvious
precedents, Brahms’s orchestral serenades. Given Jenner’s unique status as
Brahms’s composition student over a period of years, deeper comparison of the
two composers’ works should yield insights into the nature and extent of
Brahms’s influence as a teacher and into the music of a forgotten composer whom
Brahms, in striking exception to his usual practice,
deemed worthy of investing so much pedagogical time.
Parenthetical Sounds in Haydn’s “Distracted” Symphony
Anoosua Mukherjee
The final movement of
Haydn’s Symphony No. 60 (1774) opens with an absurd moment: following a short
fanfare, the symphony grinds to a halt and the sound of violinists tuning their
instruments can be heard. This impromptu “tuning session” concludes after a few
bars and the symphony resumes as if nothing unusual had occurred. By bookending
this nonsensical interlude with grand sections of composition, Haydn plays
something of a joke on his listener. This paper explores Haydn’s use of
parenthetical sounds throughout the symphony as moments of comic relief – or
sonic exploration – tucked into an otherwise sublime piece of writing. Haydn
was well known for his love of humor and spectacle, but here the composer is at
his most child-like, undermining the expectations of a tight symphonic form
with playful sound exercises and tangents of whimsical exploration.
Mimetic Silence in the
Early Eighteenth-Century Comic Intermezzo
Keith
Johnston
The frequent use of
silence as a punchline in operatic comedy of the early-eighteenth century poses
a unique interpretive problem for a poetics of opera buffa.
Does it suggest that music itself lacks the power to be funny and therefore
simply primes the audience to laugh at the real jokes—at the pauses, looks, and
exclamations that don’t find expression in the musical score? Or does it do
both? Might music, to paraphrase Falstaff, be not only witty in itself,
but the cause that wit is in other men?
“Do You Know How to
Play?”: Music, Violence, and Narrative in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a
Time in the West (1969)
Mark
Durrand
Italian film director
Sergio Leone, most famous for his series of Spaghetti Westerns in the
nineteen-sixties, invests his film-worlds with a bizarre musical significance
by relating musicality to both the threat and realization of onscreen
violence. Music and mayhem as a conflicting yet conflated pair are
woven most finely into the narrative web of Once Upon a Time in the
West (1969). A pithy exchange in the movie encapsulates
Leone’s musico-violent program, which, I argue, engenders a cinematic ethic
operating at the core of Leone’s film-worlds and the narratives they contain.
