Spring Meeting at Hunter College on Saturday, April 13th
0 Comments Published by AMSGNY President on Wednesday, April 10, 2019 at 9:07 AM.
The meeting will start at noon in room 407. Directions to Hunter College may be found here: http://music.hunter.cuny.edu/about/directions/ In addition to the presentations, on the theme "Composers and Composing," we will have our annual business meeting. There will be a special performance by cellist John Popham, as well as selections from Winterreise performed by Rufus Hallmark and Sylvia Kahane. Bring a score of the song cycle if you have one.
Here are the abstracts for the presentations:
Here are the abstracts for the presentations:
Isaac Hayes' Soul
Concept: Analyzing Hot Buttered Soul
as a Pioneering Concept Album
Bryan Terry (Hunter
College)
While
much has been made of early concept albums in rock music, investigation and
analysis has been less frequent as it relates to the same by African American
artists in the late 1960s. Early 1970s works by Marvin Gaye and Sly and the
Family Stone have been referred to as the first examples of concept albums in
African American music, yet Isaac Hayes’ 1969 album Hot Buttered Soul has been overlooked in this realm. In this paper,
I argue that Hot Buttered Soul indeed
falls into this category and that defining it as such is important in
recognizing not only Hayes’ place in the history of African American music, but
also in demonstrating the growth of the concept album in soul music in the late
1960s. The characterization of the album in this regard is dependent on three
main criteria: historical, lyrical, and musical. The 1960s served as a highly
influential decade in the development of album-centric musical writing and
production, stimulated by the innovation of the LP. The combination of this
developing technology and the environment at Stax Records—the record label with
which Hayes was affiliated—created the conditions in which Hayes would produce Hot Buttered Soul. I argue that the
album, consisting of just four songs—one original and three covers—is built
around a common theme. Additionally, Hayes gave each of the four songs one
distinctive “sound” via instrumentation, style, form and tonality, creating
unity among the four disparate songs in order to solidify the work’s place as a
pioneering concept album of the late 1960s.
The Beatles’ “White
Album" as the Beginning of a Theory of Musical Intertextuality
Christopher Doll
(Rutgers University)
Broad
studies of popular-music intertextuality (Burns and Lacasse 2018, Lacasse 2000,
Matson 2016) and genre/style (Brackett 2016, Holt 2017, Horn and Tagg 1982,
Moore 2001) have yet to yield a widely adopted, coherent vocabulary and method
of analysis. In this paper, I engage a selection of songs from the Beatles’
“White Album,” perhaps the most famous collection of juxtaposed musical styles
and genres to emerge from the twentieth century, in order to pin down three
conceptual distinctions useful for a general theory of and analytical method
for popular-music intertextuality: 1) the in/out distinction, regarding whether
we understand a song as being inside a genre/style or whether that song is
alluding to it from the outside; 2) the borrowing/reference distinction,
recognizing a difference between music that takes something from some specific
earlier music, versus music that refers to earlier music irrespective of actual
borrowing; 3) and the similarity/imitation distinction, separating more general
stylistic, generic, and coincidental resemblance from deliberate mimicry. All
these categories interact in complex ways in real music; I savor these
complexities in “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Di,” “Helter Skelter,” “Happiness is a Warm
Gun,” “Blackbird,” “Piggies,” and “Honey Pie.” The result of this work, I
argue, is a clearer (if still incomplete) picture of intertextual music like the
“White Album,” and of its relation to music preceding it, contemporaneous with
it, and subsequent to it.
Near and Far: How I
Write Away from Inspiration
Suzanne Farrin
(Hunter College)
In
this paper, I will discuss how one of my works, Corpo di terra for solo cello, engages with outside materials. The
two impetuses for the work were the 22nd poem of Petrarch’s Canzoniere and the
Allemande from Bach’s C minor cello suite BWV 1011.
Rescued from
Obscurity: Classical Form and Diegetic Music in Puccini's Operas
Karen Messina (Duke
University)
Despite
his popularity in opera houses around the world, Puccini’s academic
respectability has only solidified in the twenty-first century. Even with a
deluge of studies in the last decade, the Puccini problem yet remains: should
he be regarded as a traditional or modern composer? While various scholars
acknowledge Puccini’s work as reflecting both styles, I propose a rationale for
why this duality exists.
In
this paper, I argue that when Puccini writes diegetic music – that is, music
which exists within a portrayed world – he steps inside the drama itself,
adopting the persona of a composing character. Assuming such characters to be
less refined in the art of musical composition than Puccini himself, these
moments rationalize the presence of a more traditional idiom, especially
discernible through tight-knit Classical forms described by William Caplin.
Three increasingly obscure examples of diegetic music illustrate this premise.
The textual and musical features of “Ave, sera gentile” from Manon Lescaut (1893) that mark it as
quintessentially diegetic are subsequently undermined in its nondiegetic
repeat. The diegetic status of “Quando me’n vo’” from La bohème (1896) is complicated by textual features that typically align
with nondiegetic music while its very precise periodic structures suggest the
opposite. And a diegetic reading of “L’alba vindice appar” from Tosca (1900) hinges upon an
interpretation that also resolves musical and dramatic deficiencies. Together,
these analyses alleviate three levels of obscurity, revealing a hidden diegetic
status, a purpose for Classical forms in late Romantic opera, and Puccini’s
dedication to drama.
Debussy’s Late-Style
Homage to Stravinsky in En blanc et
noir’s Third-Movement Scherzando
Sylvia Kahan (CUNY
Graduate Center)
Debussy’s
1915 masterwork, En blanc et noir,
for two pianos, has received comparatively little exploration in the literature
on the composer. The few scholars who have written on this late work have
largely concentrated on the connections between Debussy’s reactions to World
War I and his compositional output. Analyses of En blanc’s musical content have focused especially on the embedded
allusions to German “infiltration” and Debussy’s quest to preserve French
culture from bochisme. Accordingly, the second movement, which quotes “La
Marseillaise” and Luther’s “Ein feste Burg,” has received the most attention.
With
rare exception, En blanc’s outer two
movements have been overlooked in analytical studies. The third movement Scherzando, dedicated to Igor
Stravinsky, has gotten especially short shrift. I would argue that the movement
is a reflection of both the admiration and the anxiety that Debussy experienced
in grappling with Stravinsky’s new kind of modernism. For the older composer, Petrushka embodied a “sonorous magic”;
the Sacre du printemps “haunted”
Debussy “like a beautiful nightmare.” Although feeling himself to be “over the
hill,” Debussy also acknowledged to Stravinsky “a special satisfaction in
stating how much you have pushed back against the permissible limits of the
empire of sounds.” In En blanc et noir’s
third movement, which abounds with subtle allusions to The Firebird and Petrushka,
Debussy simultaneously renders homage to the Russian composer while moving
towards the integrated musical language that reached full flower in his final compositions.
Redeeming Ralph
Vaughan Williams: The Sea Theme in the Ninth and Variations for Brass Band
Stephen Allen (Rider
University)
This
paper investigates the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams’ lifelong use of
a tune I title the Sea Theme, which morphs in different contexts. For the first
time I show how RVW’s use of the Sea Theme in his Variations for Brass Band
completely changes the way we would hear this evolution at the end of his life
in the Ninth Symphony.
Broadly
speaking the paper changes the current view of RVW’s late negative or
pessimistic world view into one where issues of optimism, transcendence become
possible—thus fulfilling the minor moments of optimism hinted at in the Ninth.
Triple Meter in
Schubert's Winterreise: A Quirk
Rufus Hallmark
(Rutgers University)
Recently
I was invited to contribute a chapter to a “casebook” on Schubert’s Winterreise. I began to notice an
intriguing singularity involving five of the eight triple meter songs in this
cycle. It is this topic that I want to explore. The first triple meter song, Der Lindenbaum, follows a conventional
rhythmic-metric convention for setting a text in triple meter, but five of the
others depart from that convention and apply a pattern of their own. The
pattern has been observed piecemeal by scholars writing about Winterreise (Feil, Youens, Kramer,
Johnson, Bostridge), but no one, I believe, has noted its fairly consistent
usage throughout the cycle; it leaves a strong imprint. This paper is
open-ended, and I shall invite the audience’s participation to help me conclude
it!
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