Winter 2018 Meeting Abstracts
0 Comments Published by AMSGNY President on Tuesday, January 2, 2018 at 4:54 PM.
Lynette Bowring (Rutgers University): Musicking or Musical Work? The Passamezzo from Improvised Formula to Composition
Formulaic patterns such as the ciaccona, romanesca, or bergamasca frequently structured compositions in the early 1600s. Many of these formulas originated in the previous century, when—to use Christopher Small’s term—they could be considered as vehicles for “musicking,” rather than unique musical works. Scholars have identified these formulas in many pieces, and analysts have suggested that adaptations of these harmonic patterns also underpinned compositions in less audible ways. Nevertheless, there remain important questions to ask about the roles that these formulas played in musical life, and how they relate to issues of ontology and creativity in this period. Using the passamezzo as a case study, I argue that the increasing prevalence of these formulas in notated compositions marked changing attitudes towards creativity and individuality in the early seventeenth century, and that this change in the fundamental nature of the formula allowed composers to consider their compositions as artistic creations from individual minds.
Liu Ye (Columnist for the Chinese monthly Musical Instrument): The Piano Art in China since the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and the Beginning of the “Reform and Open Policy”
Today China has about 30 million people who are learning the piano. This enormous interest in the piano has led to China’s current notable strengths in the classical music field. It is based, in part, on a “spiritual hunger” that arose since World War II. For many years before 1976 classical music was absent, creating a cultural “vacuum.” Music is a spiritual necessity for people; thus, after three decades of constraint, the need for appreciating and playing music was suddenly being met. In addition, there was the issue of fulfilling the hopes of Chinese parents, particularly the parents born before the 1970s who rarely had the chance to study classical music. When their social situation improved, the parents strongly wanted their children to meet their dreams. And finally, there is the “role model effect” observed in recent years. There are great young pianists such as Lang Lang, Wang Yuja, and Zhang Haochen performing actively around the world. Many children who study piano admire them, and see them as role models.
Luca Levi Sala (New York University) : Muzio Clementi’s Output Beyond England: Dissemination, Issues of Authenticity and Textual Problems in Vienna (1787-1799)
Between 1780 and 1820 Clementi’s output circulated widely throughout continental Europe. His works were reissued by numerous French publishers, including Bailleux, Imbault, Castaud and Porro, Boyer, Sieber and Pleyel and also reprinted and redistributed by many others. The same can be said of the publishing networks encompassing German speaking countries, including Artaria, Torricella, Mollo, and Hoffmeister, Kühnel, Peters, Schott, and so forth. Clementi is likely to have been one of the most frequently and widely published foreign composers in Vienna during the last quarter of the eighteenth century and Artaria was probably Clementi’s most frequent publisher.
In this talk I will examine a great number of editions issued before 1800 by Artaria, whose output exemplifies the widespread dissemination of Clementi’s work among publishers that operated mainly throughout Paris, Leipzig, Offenbach, Mannheim and Vienna. Examination of these facilitates an increased understanding of the process by which errors, erroneous readings and variants were inherited in Artaria’s Clementi editions, raising doubts about the quality of the text eventually transmitted and performed.
Danielle Bastone (Music in Gotham): The Sublimity of Dussek's Suffering Queen of France
In the late summer of 1793, the London press provided almost daily accounts of Marie Antoinette’s captivity and trial. Concern for her welfare and repugnance at the accusers who compromised it became regular topics in the columns about France, as did English support for the Queen’s absolution. News of the regicide in October accordingly elicited fresh condemnations of the sanguinary French leaders and an exaltation of their former monarch, who, it was incessantly reported, met her unjust fate with dignity.
Within weeks of the guillotine’s fall, virtuoso pianist and composer Jan Ladislav Dussek published a new piece in London for solo piano titled The Sufferings of the Queen of France. Each of the work’s ten movements would depict a stage of the Queen’s demise, beginning with her imprisonment and culminating with her apotheosis. The piece belongs to a body of English music written in response to Marie Antoinette’s ruination, much of which unabashedly commercialized the execution for a staunchly monarchist public. Yet beneath its own commercial exterior, The Sufferings sets itself apart from other music of its kind. Dussek’s musical and narrative choices portray the Queen not as a figure to be pitied, but rather as a sublime heroine.
Heather Platt (Ball State University): “A Novel Affair”: The Establishment of Lieder Recitals in 19th Century America
In 1898 Max Heinrich recalled “Why, twelve years ago I could not get even my friends in America to listen to Schubert and Schumann songs”; and he repeatedly claimed he was responsible for introducing the American public to Lieder. Heinrich, a German immigrant, was known for recitals that had the aura of gentleman's club; he sat at the piano singing, playing and talking to the audience. I examine his claims by tracing the genesis of Lieder recitals in America to their establishment in the 1880s. Although scholars of the transatlantic transfer of German music have ignored Lieder, singers in America, such as Heinrich, belonged to the network of proponents of the other German genres.
Reuben Phillips (Princeton University): Brahms as Reader: Examining the Young Kreisler’s Treasure Chest
One of the most fascinating sources of information about Johannes Brahms’s early artistic inclinations is a collection of quotations, aphorisms and poems known as Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein. Comprising four notebooks, the Schatzkästlein, or treasure chest, was begun by Brahms in his native city of Hamburg with the majority of subsequent entries added by the mid-1850s. Titled in homage to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fictional character of Johannes Kreisler, these notebooks provide evidence of the young Brahms’s voracious consumption of German literature. For his biographer Max Kalbeck, the entries seemed to provide the key to Brahms’s “innermost being”. The Deutsche Brahms Gesellschaft published an edition of notebooks in 1909, but despite this and, in recent decades, the presence of an English translation, the Schatzkästlein has rarely been subjected to scholarly scrutiny.
Drawing on surviving primary source materials housed in Vienna, including the last of the four notebooks and Brahms’s library inventories, this paper provides a critical account of the Schatzkästlein in the context of Brahms’s youthful passion for borrowing and buying books. Which sources did Brahms turn to in harvesting the poems, aphorisms and quotations? What ideas about music, art and society do the entries articulate? And how does the aesthetic world-view of the Schatzkästlein relate to that of Brahms’s mentor Robert Schumann? In pondering these issues, I consider the notebooks variously as a document of Brahms’s self-directed education, an expression of his high aesthetic ideals, and as a kind of secular psalter that was integral to the development of his distinctive musical sensibility.
Jon Churchill (Duke University): A Second Battlefield: Semantic Exchange in Vaughan Williams’s London and Pastoral Symphonies
As a stretcher bearer in WWI, Ralph Vaughan Williams survived events that fundamentally altered his personal life and later works. The clearest musical changes emerge in A London Symphony (1912), begun before the war and edited during, and the Pastoral Symphony (1921), a work first conceived on the Western Front. While the latter work earned the moniker “Vaughan Williams’s War Requiem,” the trenches’ effects first appear in the edits to A London Symphony. There, the composer deletes a gesturally-rich section named “Nocturne” that contains three features common throughout his larger oeuvre: sarabande rhythms, harmonic stasis, and arch-shaped interruptive gestures. Pages of near silence take their place.
The features’ reappearance in the Pastoral reveals their traumatic associations and suggests a protective drive behind their removal. By engaging Vaughan Williams’s own remarks, semiotics, and traditional analysis, this work is the first to illuminate the psychological links between musical gestures and physical experiences that motivated Vaughan Williams’s sweeping edits.
This multifaceted approach uncovers specific changes in Vaughan William’s compositional language and their causes. Both discoveries stand to reveal much about the workings of a sparsely-researched figure, his puzzling later works, and his relationship with one of humanity’s darkest periods.
Formulaic patterns such as the ciaccona, romanesca, or bergamasca frequently structured compositions in the early 1600s. Many of these formulas originated in the previous century, when—to use Christopher Small’s term—they could be considered as vehicles for “musicking,” rather than unique musical works. Scholars have identified these formulas in many pieces, and analysts have suggested that adaptations of these harmonic patterns also underpinned compositions in less audible ways. Nevertheless, there remain important questions to ask about the roles that these formulas played in musical life, and how they relate to issues of ontology and creativity in this period. Using the passamezzo as a case study, I argue that the increasing prevalence of these formulas in notated compositions marked changing attitudes towards creativity and individuality in the early seventeenth century, and that this change in the fundamental nature of the formula allowed composers to consider their compositions as artistic creations from individual minds.
Liu Ye (Columnist for the Chinese monthly Musical Instrument): The Piano Art in China since the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and the Beginning of the “Reform and Open Policy”
Today China has about 30 million people who are learning the piano. This enormous interest in the piano has led to China’s current notable strengths in the classical music field. It is based, in part, on a “spiritual hunger” that arose since World War II. For many years before 1976 classical music was absent, creating a cultural “vacuum.” Music is a spiritual necessity for people; thus, after three decades of constraint, the need for appreciating and playing music was suddenly being met. In addition, there was the issue of fulfilling the hopes of Chinese parents, particularly the parents born before the 1970s who rarely had the chance to study classical music. When their social situation improved, the parents strongly wanted their children to meet their dreams. And finally, there is the “role model effect” observed in recent years. There are great young pianists such as Lang Lang, Wang Yuja, and Zhang Haochen performing actively around the world. Many children who study piano admire them, and see them as role models.
Luca Levi Sala (New York University) : Muzio Clementi’s Output Beyond England: Dissemination, Issues of Authenticity and Textual Problems in Vienna (1787-1799)
Between 1780 and 1820 Clementi’s output circulated widely throughout continental Europe. His works were reissued by numerous French publishers, including Bailleux, Imbault, Castaud and Porro, Boyer, Sieber and Pleyel and also reprinted and redistributed by many others. The same can be said of the publishing networks encompassing German speaking countries, including Artaria, Torricella, Mollo, and Hoffmeister, Kühnel, Peters, Schott, and so forth. Clementi is likely to have been one of the most frequently and widely published foreign composers in Vienna during the last quarter of the eighteenth century and Artaria was probably Clementi’s most frequent publisher.
In this talk I will examine a great number of editions issued before 1800 by Artaria, whose output exemplifies the widespread dissemination of Clementi’s work among publishers that operated mainly throughout Paris, Leipzig, Offenbach, Mannheim and Vienna. Examination of these facilitates an increased understanding of the process by which errors, erroneous readings and variants were inherited in Artaria’s Clementi editions, raising doubts about the quality of the text eventually transmitted and performed.
Danielle Bastone (Music in Gotham): The Sublimity of Dussek's Suffering Queen of France
In the late summer of 1793, the London press provided almost daily accounts of Marie Antoinette’s captivity and trial. Concern for her welfare and repugnance at the accusers who compromised it became regular topics in the columns about France, as did English support for the Queen’s absolution. News of the regicide in October accordingly elicited fresh condemnations of the sanguinary French leaders and an exaltation of their former monarch, who, it was incessantly reported, met her unjust fate with dignity.
Within weeks of the guillotine’s fall, virtuoso pianist and composer Jan Ladislav Dussek published a new piece in London for solo piano titled The Sufferings of the Queen of France. Each of the work’s ten movements would depict a stage of the Queen’s demise, beginning with her imprisonment and culminating with her apotheosis. The piece belongs to a body of English music written in response to Marie Antoinette’s ruination, much of which unabashedly commercialized the execution for a staunchly monarchist public. Yet beneath its own commercial exterior, The Sufferings sets itself apart from other music of its kind. Dussek’s musical and narrative choices portray the Queen not as a figure to be pitied, but rather as a sublime heroine.
Heather Platt (Ball State University): “A Novel Affair”: The Establishment of Lieder Recitals in 19th Century America
In 1898 Max Heinrich recalled “Why, twelve years ago I could not get even my friends in America to listen to Schubert and Schumann songs”; and he repeatedly claimed he was responsible for introducing the American public to Lieder. Heinrich, a German immigrant, was known for recitals that had the aura of gentleman's club; he sat at the piano singing, playing and talking to the audience. I examine his claims by tracing the genesis of Lieder recitals in America to their establishment in the 1880s. Although scholars of the transatlantic transfer of German music have ignored Lieder, singers in America, such as Heinrich, belonged to the network of proponents of the other German genres.
Reuben Phillips (Princeton University): Brahms as Reader: Examining the Young Kreisler’s Treasure Chest
One of the most fascinating sources of information about Johannes Brahms’s early artistic inclinations is a collection of quotations, aphorisms and poems known as Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein. Comprising four notebooks, the Schatzkästlein, or treasure chest, was begun by Brahms in his native city of Hamburg with the majority of subsequent entries added by the mid-1850s. Titled in homage to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fictional character of Johannes Kreisler, these notebooks provide evidence of the young Brahms’s voracious consumption of German literature. For his biographer Max Kalbeck, the entries seemed to provide the key to Brahms’s “innermost being”. The Deutsche Brahms Gesellschaft published an edition of notebooks in 1909, but despite this and, in recent decades, the presence of an English translation, the Schatzkästlein has rarely been subjected to scholarly scrutiny.
Drawing on surviving primary source materials housed in Vienna, including the last of the four notebooks and Brahms’s library inventories, this paper provides a critical account of the Schatzkästlein in the context of Brahms’s youthful passion for borrowing and buying books. Which sources did Brahms turn to in harvesting the poems, aphorisms and quotations? What ideas about music, art and society do the entries articulate? And how does the aesthetic world-view of the Schatzkästlein relate to that of Brahms’s mentor Robert Schumann? In pondering these issues, I consider the notebooks variously as a document of Brahms’s self-directed education, an expression of his high aesthetic ideals, and as a kind of secular psalter that was integral to the development of his distinctive musical sensibility.
Jon Churchill (Duke University): A Second Battlefield: Semantic Exchange in Vaughan Williams’s London and Pastoral Symphonies
As a stretcher bearer in WWI, Ralph Vaughan Williams survived events that fundamentally altered his personal life and later works. The clearest musical changes emerge in A London Symphony (1912), begun before the war and edited during, and the Pastoral Symphony (1921), a work first conceived on the Western Front. While the latter work earned the moniker “Vaughan Williams’s War Requiem,” the trenches’ effects first appear in the edits to A London Symphony. There, the composer deletes a gesturally-rich section named “Nocturne” that contains three features common throughout his larger oeuvre: sarabande rhythms, harmonic stasis, and arch-shaped interruptive gestures. Pages of near silence take their place.
The features’ reappearance in the Pastoral reveals their traumatic associations and suggests a protective drive behind their removal. By engaging Vaughan Williams’s own remarks, semiotics, and traditional analysis, this work is the first to illuminate the psychological links between musical gestures and physical experiences that motivated Vaughan Williams’s sweeping edits.
This multifaceted approach uncovers specific changes in Vaughan William’s compositional language and their causes. Both discoveries stand to reveal much about the workings of a sparsely-researched figure, his puzzling later works, and his relationship with one of humanity’s darkest periods.
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