AMSGNY Meetings


Fall Meeting at Hunter College--Music and Politics

The Fall Meeting for 2015 will take place on Saturday, October 24th at Hunter College, 695 Park Avenue, NYC 10065.  Go to room 404.  The topic for this meeting is "Music and Politics."  We will be serving a light lunch, compliments of David Hurwitz.


Hunter College is located at 68th Street and Lexington Avenue. Here is a link to directions: 
http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/abouthunter/maps/68th-street-main-campus

Because of Hunter's new security system, guests are required to enter through the West Building, on the southwest corner of 68th and Lexington. From there, you should take the escalator to the third floor, walk across 68th Street on the enclosed bridge, and turn left into the North Building. You can reach the fourth floor by stairs or elevator. Room 404 is on the west side of the building.


The schedule is as follows:

Session I 12 noon

Eric Hung, Rider University--The History and Politics of Water through Music and Dance: The Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia’s Performance of Turbine

Nathaniel Sloan, Fordham University--Harold Arlen and Tin Pan Politics

Jeff Dailey, Five Towns College--Exploring the Meaning of Utopia, Limited

Lunch 2 PM

Session II 2:30 PM

Barry Wiener, CUNY Graduate Center--“Young Classicality” [Junge Klassizität] and German Cultural Chauvinism

Catherine Coppola, Hunter College--Fear of Feminine Power: Hillary Clinton and the Queen of the Night

David Hurwitz, Classicstoday.com--The Vibrato Monologues: Sexual Politics and Expressive String Timbre

Abstracts for Fall Meeting



Eric Hung, Rider University

The History and Politics of Water through Music and Dance:
The Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia’s Performance of Turbine

From 1815 to 1909, the Fairmount Water Works pumped clean water from the Schuykill River to the city of Philadelphia.  A place that combined natural scenery, monumental architecture and state-of-the-art engineering, it was a prime tourist spot throughout the 19th century—a site that inspired numerous writings and paintings. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the opening of the Fairmount Water Works, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia commissioned composer Byron Au Yong and dancer Leah Stein to create a site-specific work entitled Turbine.  Over the course of an hour, four-dozen singers and eight dancers lead the audience from one end of the Water Works to the other, following the flow of the river. This presentation examines how Turbine uses 18th- and 19th-century poetry about Philadelphia, the surrounding natural environment, mimetic gestures and sounds, borrowed music, and artifacts from the turbines to construct an environmental history of Philadelphia. 

Nathaniel Sloan, Fordham University

Harold Arlen and Tin Pan Politics

Harold Arlen's musical output contains scant social commentary, with songs like "I've Got the World on a String" (1931) or "Stormy Weather" (1933) more notable for their bluesy brilliance than their political edge. Still, Arlen wrote such pieces in a locale of heightened racial tension: Harlem's Cotton Club (1923-1936), where Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington performed Arlen compositions, but black clients were not allowed through the club's doors.  This paper explores the uneasy relations between black musicians and Jewish songwriters in interwar New York City.

Jeff Dailey, Five Towns College

 Exploring the Meaning of Utopia, Limited

Utopia, Limited, or the Flowers of Progress was the penultimate collaboration between Arthur Sullivan and William Gilbert.  Not as well-known as the works which preceded it, it explores British institutions in a foreign setting.  Utopia, a kingdom in the South Pacific, seeks to modernize by adopting British ways.  This premise gave Gilbert the opportunity to satirize British government and business policies by breaking them down into their simplest units and presenting them in a foreign setting.  The large scale humor comes from seeing Pacific islanders attempting to become English.  However, there is a violently satirical underpinning to what is happening, and that is what my paper will explore. 

Barry Wiener, CUNY Graduate Center

“Young Classicality” [Junge Klassizität] and German Cultural Chauvinism

During the 1930s, the British composer-critics Cecil Gray and Constant Lambert made extravagant claims on behalf of the music of Jean Sibelius, asserting that he was the world’s greatest symphonist. Both men linked their praise for Sibelius to admiration for continental modernism and a repudiation of cultural nationalism and chauvinism. By tracing their polemic to its origins, I have been able to connect their ideas to Ferruccio Busoni’s thoughts about music history and his speculations about the future of music during the years immediately before and after World War I.

Catherine Coppola, Hunter College

Fear of Feminine Power: Hillary Clinton and the Queen of the Night

The notion of Hillary Clinton as the Queen of the Night may invite knowing nods from those who accept the view of the Queen as a crazed, power-hungry woman, and who see similar representations of Clinton as too obvious for discussion.  I suggest that we have much to learn from the disempowered heroine in the Magic Flute regarding contemporary perceptions of female power. Like the operatic stage, the political arena is full of larger-than-life moments that betray otherwise unspoken biases. I trace connections among Hillary Clinton, Christine Quinn, and Carly Fiorina, and two of Mozart’s women whose strongest feminist statements are almost always cut from contemporary productions: the Queen and Marcellina.
This connection to the treatment of today’s women has not been fully made, as critics focus on the mindset of Mozart and his contemporaries (a mindset that was actually much more nuanced than is commonly recognized) when grappling with misogyny. As I demonstrate in the treatment of American female politicians, rather than luxuriate in our presumed distance from arguably misunderstood 18th–century views, we should see Mozart’s females in the context of an early twenty-first century that is still not ready to accept women as rational beings. 




David Hurwitz, Classicstoday.com

The Vibrato Monologues: Sexual Politics and Expressive String Timbre

The attitude of nineteenth-century musicians, critics, and other tastemakers towards vibrato reveals a striking level of ambivalence. Among purely musical techniques, vibrato is virtually unique in being linked specifically to the wider dangers of pervasive effeminacy characteristic of a period that embraced a strongly gendered discourse on aesthetics and culture. Exploration of this phenomenon raises interesting questions for proponents of “historically informed” performance. Specifically, this discussion suggests that it is not sufficient to know merely what musicians may have done. We must also know why. Absent the “why,” we cannot make truly musical decisions about what constitutes historically informed performance. Instead, we risk letting irrelevant, ignorant, or even morally repugnant ideas govern our approach both to technique and interpretation.


Nathaniel Sloan, Fordham University

Harold Arlen and Tin Pan Politics


Harold Arlen's musical output contains scant social commentary, with songs like "I've Got the World on a String" (1931) or "Stormy Weather" (1933) more notable for their bluesy brilliance than their political edge. Still, Arlen wrote such pieces in a locale of heightened racial tension: Harlem's Cotton Club (1923-1936), where Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington performed Arlen compositions, but black clients were not allowed through the club's doors.  This paper explores the uneasy relations between black musicians and Jewish songwriters in interwar New York City.




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