Abstracts for Fall Meeting
0 Comments Published by AMSGNY President on Saturday, October 10, 2015 at 12:32 AM.
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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