AMSGNY Meetings


Winter Meeting--February 2, 2019

The winter meeting will take place at Columbia University on Saturday, February 2, 2019.  It will take place in 622 Dodge Hall.  Here is a link to a map of the campus:

http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/

You need to enter from College Walk, up the steps, to the left, into the main door of Dodge, which is actually on the third floor above campus level.  The building is right near the 116th Street stop on the 1 train.  

Here's the schedule:

12PM-1PM: Classical Era Editions and Treatises
Luca Sala: Luigi Boccherini’s Stabat Mater: Philological Issues and the Problem with the Modern Editions
Elizabeth Marcinkiewicz: Frederick the Great: Through the Lens of Quantz's On Playing the Flute

1:15PM-2:45PM: Religion and Hope
Natasha Walsh: Should Children Sing About Death?
Owen Hansen: Reaching Towards Heaven: An Examination of Robert Schumann’s Views About Religion in His Requiem Mass in D-Flat Major, Op. 148
Ji Young Kim: Memory, Hope, and Brahms's Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann Op. 9

3PM-4PM: Composers And...
Barry Wiener: Stefan Wolpe and Palestine
Jordan Stokes: Song, Race, and the Colonial Past: Xavier Montsalvatge's Cinco Canciones Negras
Here are the abstracts:



Luca Sala (Université de Montréal)  Luigi Boccherini’s Stabat Mater: Philological Issues and the Problem with the Modern Editions

Between 1781 and 1801 Luigi Boccherini produced two different versions of the Stabat Mater. The first one, for soprano and string quintet, bearing no opus number, was likely composed in 1781. This version is known through the existence of a unique manuscript, now preserved at the Library of Congress. The second version, bears the Op. n. 61, as provided in the editio princeps. Written for three voices and string quintet around 1800-1801, this version was probably prepared and destined to be sold on the Parisian market. Its history and textual genealogy are more complex, encompassing fourteen sources, among manuscript and prints. The present paper will deal with the issues related to the reconstruction of the critical edition. Particular focus will be also given on the textual variants encompassing the modern editions published in the last thirty years.

Elizabeth Marcinkiewicz (Longy School of Music)  Frederick the Great: Through the Lens of Quantz's On Playing the Flute

Johann Joachim Quantz wrote his treatise, On Playing the Flute, while under the employ of his most well-known student, Frederick the Great of Prussia. While Frederick is known as a flutist and composer, to what extent did he embody his teacher’s standards of a good musician? Using Quantz’s treatise as a litmus test, I examine Frederick’s playing, compositions, and character to discuss whether the king should be considered a “good” musician, and the implications of such clear-cut labels as “good” and “bad.”  

Natasha Walsh (York University) Should Children Sing About Death?

Among the countless challenges of parenting, broaching the topic of mortality with one’s child may seem a heavy and thoughtful task. The essay “Singing about Death in American Protestant Hymnody” by Jeffery VanderWilt discusses death as it was and is taught by Protestants in America, spanning from its beginning until modern day.  This paper addresses what American Protestant children truly did sing about regarding death in the Colonial days, and the different approaches of varying denominations.  

Owen Hansen (University of Kansas)   Reaching towards Heaven: An Examination of Robert Schumann’s Views about Religion in His Requiem Mass in D-Flat Major, Op. 148

While research on Robert Schumann has focused primarily on his secular vocal and instrumental works, very little has been discussed concerning the few sacred compositions Schumann made during his lifetime. Most notably, the Requiem Mass in D-flat Major is rarely discussed by Schumann scholars either because the piece was written near the end of his lifetime or because the piece is not as innovative as the Mozart, Cherubini or Verdi Requiems. What those few scholars who have studied the work have realized is that Schumann's approach to the liturgy of the Catholic Mass provides a unique blending of Catholic beliefs about death and resurrection with Protestant  ideals about forgiveness and acceptance of one's own sins. This provides a work that focuses more inwardly on the struggle of the individual then on the final judgment awaiting them in Heaven.

Ji Young Kim (Cornell University) Memory, Hope, and Brahms's Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann Op. 9

In an article from 1862 about Brahms’s early compositions, Adolf Schubring called the Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann Op. 9 “the most worthy Nänie that was ever sung for a master by his pupil.” This description has resonated powerfully since, even though, as Paul Berry recently pointed out, it “jumbled chronology”: Brahms wrote his Op. 9 in 1854, two years before Robert’s death.  In this presentation, I pay closer attention to that chronology to reconstruct some of the complex ways in which Brahms, Clara, and friends navigated trauma and disability in the wake of Robert’s transfer to a psychiatric hospital. These circumstances, I argue, inflected the contrapuntal intensity and various kinds of duets staged by Op. 9 as well as other projects from the year 1854.

Barry Wiener (CUNY Graduate Center) Stefan Wolpe and Palestine

In recent years, scholars who study the music of Stefan Wolpe have uncovered a seemingly unbridgeable gap between his leftist, cosmopolitan political views and his musical practice during his four years in Palestine, from 1934–38. Drawing on previously unexamined documents as well as published and unpublished works, I will set Wolpe’s music in historical context in order to properly evaluate his attitudes to Judaism and Zionism. I will discuss pieces written in both Palestine and the United States, including “Sim Shalom” (1937), “Holem Tza’adi” (1937), “Lo Nelech Mi Po” (1939), “Isaiah” (1938), Israel and his Land (fragment, 1939), the Yigdal cantata (1945), “David’s Lament over Jonathan” (1954), and “Four Choruses” (1955).

Jordan Stokes (West Chester University) Song, Race, and the Colonial Past:  Xavier Montsalvatge's Cinco Canciones Negras

Xavier Montsalvatge’s reputation as a composer rests squarely on the song cycle Cinco Canciones Negras (1945) and the antillanismo style he developed for this composition, which blends jazz, folk, and popular influences with classical art song. The work is both brilliant and troubling. Drawing on the work of Kojin Karatani and Achille Mbembe, I argue that even as Cinco Canciones Negras attempts to decenter European culture, it reinscribes the centrality of the European observer, and in its own way exemplifies the very Orientalist project that it attempts to critique.


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