AMSGNY Meetings

Our first meeting in 2021 will take place on Saturday, January 30th, starting at 10 AM.  All are welcome to attend.  Join us at Zoom link https://zoom.us/j/9453643107.  

SESSION I—19^TH CENTURY PERFORMANCE  10 AM – 11 AM

Walter Scott’s Lullaby: Charlotte Cushman, Feminine Chronologies, and the Maidenly Mode of Singing 

Alexandra Swanson (Washington University)

           This presentation considers Charlotte Cushman's portrayal of Meg Merrilies in Daniel Terry's theatrical adaptation of Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering and, specifically, her introduction of Walter Scott and John Whitaker’s lullaby "Oh Rest Thee Babe" to the role in 1837. Cushman's performance of this lullaby brought conventional femininity to the fore of Meg Merrilies's otherwise non-musical and rather masculine character. I argue that attention to this characterological disruption clarifies our understanding of melodramatic stagings of femininity in the United States and England in the mid-nineteenth century. Cushman's performance of the lullaby provided a conventionally feminine space for Meg Merrilies to momentarily inhabit, first, by adhering to what Roger Freitas has called "the maidenly mode" in nineteenth-century operatic singing and, second, by referencing and echoing earlier instances of conventional femininity in the play as well as in Cushman's past performance career. Cushman's addition of the lullaby to Meg Merrilies's character revealed points of continuity between the harsh, manly Meg Merrilies and the other women in the play, who all display more conventionally feminine modes.

 Alexandra Swenson is a Ph.D. candidate in English and American literature at Washington University in St. Louis. She specializes in nineteenth-century British and American literature, and her research interests include performance theory, popular literature, and the intersection of music and literature.

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 Behind the Mask: Late Rossini and the Uncanny Salon

Simon Cohen (Columbia University)

Despite receiving scant attention from scholars and performers, Rossini’s Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age), written between 1857 and 1868 for his private salon, have a unique and expressive stylistic language. In them, the composer gives musical voice to the uncanny discourses that emerged around the idea of his “creative death.” In this presentation, I establish how Rossini’s return to composition functioned as a sort of musical “exhumation” in which the composer emerged as a ghostly and obscure figure and a site for broader discourses about disease, mental illness, and death in nineteenth-century France. Close readings of visual depictions of Rossini by Eugène Delacroix and Antoine Etex indicate that the composer rested on a slippery inflection point between Classical and Romantic aesthetics of creative inspiration, and that the tensions engendered by this precarious status constitute a kind of doubleness that can be heard in his late compositions. Bringing together cultural history and musical analysis, I will show that the privacy of Rossini’s salon gave rise to music with unique signifying potential—quite separate from what he wrote for the stage—that has not yet been acknowledged. 

 Simon Cohen is a senior undergraduate at Columbia University, where he studies musicology and composition. He is interested questions of malady, memory, and materiality, particularly in late-nineteenth and twentieth century music. He has worked with Professors Elaine Sisman, Walter Frisch, and Julia Doe as musicological mentors. At Columbia, Simon served as the president of Columbia New Music, a group which promotes the discussion and performance of contemporary music. He is the music director of the New Opera Workshop, Columbia’s only club dedicated to opera performance. From 2018-19, Simon served as head of the Classical department at WKCR-FM, the campus radio station.

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SESSION 2 – OPERA, RUSSIAN AND OTHERWISE  11:30 AM – 1 PM

The “Everyday Truth” of Realist Operatic Set Design in Fin-de-Siècle Paris

Catherine Ludlow (University of Washington)

                  Modern-day scholars of Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande often dismiss the opera’s debut stage setting as a curiosity at odds with the Symbolist and Impressionist aesthetics of the opera’s text and music.  The “folly” of strikingly detailed forests and interiors was seen as being corrected by later, avant-garde design.  Today, abstract sets are common.

     The original set designers, Eugène Ronsin and Lucien Jusseaume, were well-regarded artists, and Jusseaume in particular found fame not only in Paris, but across France and abroad.  Jusseaume’s designs were informed by research trips and photographs of foreign lands; his dedication to Realism, an aesthetic rising during the emergence of cinema and photography, made him a highly respected figure in the Parisian theatre world.
            Realism as an artistic philosophy in this era was not merely material that seemed “real”: instead, it fed off of the everyday, the familiar, to depict its artistic truth. In opera, Realist set design enabled a particularly enlivened interaction between literary, musical, and theatrical truths; the visual, the aural, the emotional.  While other attempts at such vérité have received much study, such as the contemporary Italian verismo movement, the Parisian Realist settings of operatic works are less explored.
           This presentation will examine Realism in Parisian operatic set design c. 1900, centered on Pelléas et Mélisande but informed by other productions by Jusseaume and the Opéra Comique.  My argument will focus on the choice of Realism which, I argue, enabled operas to evoke a more familiar, intimate drama for their audiences.  It will embrace recent research on the Opéra Comique and its director Albert Carré, by Michaela Niccolai and Philippe Blay; contemporary, technical developments of Parisian theatres, by Rémy Campos and Aurélien Poidevin; and resources such as the museum of the Opéra de Vichy and the Gaumont Pathé film archive.
           The Opéra Comique’s productions from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—including Pelléas et Mélisande—depended on Realist design for their success.  Contemporary accounts make this fact clear.  This presentation will consider the role of such design and how it was integral to the audience’s acceptance and adoration of these productions.

 

Catherine Ludlow is a doctoral candidate in Music History at the University of Washington and the secretary-treasurer of the Pacific Northwest chapter of the AMS.  Her current research examines Realist aesthetics in productions at the Parisian Opéra Comique c. 1900, and the artists who bridged the operatic and early film worlds.  Professionally she works for the UW School of Public Health, training faculty in the use of learning technologies, creating best practice documentation, and supporting curriculum development.

Originally from northern New Jersey, Catherine earned her undergraduate degree in Theatre Arts and Speech from Rutgers University, later working in the New York area as a theatrical costumer.  After a few years in business, she returned to school for her master's in musicology at Western Illinois University, completing a thesis on Schumann's Manfred and the influence of English Romanticism on the Continent in the nineteenth century.

More broadly, her research interests center on the long nineteenth century, including science and technology and their influence on the arts, depictions of the natural world in music, settings of English literature in translation, and music and dance of the French Baroque.

 

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 But what does it sound like? A traditional Listener and a ‘New Listener’ hear “Kashchey the Deathless.” 

John David Vandevert (Westminster Choir College)

“The new listeners uplifted the performers with their energy and faith. As a result, the ‘overplayed’ and ‘oversung’ pieces were being performed in a new way.”¹ S. Hentova’s observation of the newly liberated 1960s Leningradian audience and its response to music, namely ‘with their hearts,’ reflects the sociological endeavor of B. Asafiev to restore the Proletariat’s derelict awareness of their cultural heritage through the ‘art of sound,’ the process dubbed ‘culturology’ by E. Viljanen and ‘perception’ by Bogdanov. Bearing witness to the superficial layers of music, i.e., playing the score, singing in a choir, or listening to any type of audible content, does not equate to ‘hearing’ by default, nor does it condition the Musicologist to the realm of ‘knowing’. Rather, ‘Formalist listening’ and Academic stringency actively prevents substantive, poly-dimensional contemplations, as treating music as ‘a fine art’² without recognizing the ‘historical, holistic, and organic’³ components is to treat music as ‘неживое образное искусство’ (non-living, figurative art), or in N. Marr’s thoughts ‘musealization’ (музеефикатция)⁵. Instead of musical literacy based on ‘abstract instrumentalism,’ music should be seen as ‘an experience of the epoch,’ a sonic representation of the composer’s experience within society. In 1923, Trotsky had said, “the artist who creates this form, and the spectator...They are living people, with a crystallized psychology...the result of social conditions”⁴ describing the artist as one ‘who creates and who consumes what has been created.’ To demonstrate how one could start to ‘hear’ music’s ‘реальное положение’ (real position), Rimsky-Korsakov's one-act opera, ‘Kashchey the Deathless’, specifically the Third Tableau, will serve as a conduit for analysis inspired by Asafiev’s psycho-methodological approach to musical understanding, labelled in 1918 as ‘жизненни роста развития’ (life growth-development).

 John David Vandevert is a recent graduate of Westminster Choir College and a current Music Researcher and Writer whose interests center around how music is comprehended as a 'living' art form and retraining ossified methodologies of music analysis to better represent music's true form. He has presented research both collegiately and non-collegiately, ranging in topics from Samuel Barber and Svetlana Nesterova, to Soviet Musicological practices, and will be presenting this July at the IASPM 2021 Conference on Soviet and Post-Soviet musical mediums and what could be gleaned from a survey of the recorded music in Russia. He plans on pursuing Ph.D. studies with a potential focus being on the innovation of musical hearing as relayed by Russian Musicologist Boris Asafiev, and what could be scholastically gained from observing music as perpetually 'becoming'.

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 Whose War, Whose Memory, Whose Mazepa? Tchaikovsky’s Mazepa as a Study in Operatic Catalysis

John Pendergast (West Point – United States Military Academy)

           Tchaikovsky's Mazepa is a breathtaking tragedy depicting the enormous human cost of insurrection and war, the pain of loss, and the enduring will to remember. The Met’s first production of this opera came long after WWII in 2006, more than 120 years after its simultaneous premiere in Moscow and St Petersburg in 1884. Lavish and sensuous, Yuri Alexandrov’s vision provoked mixed reviews.

            The image of Mazepa that emerges from Tchaikovsky's opera is rather different from the one familiar to western Europeans via Byron's poem, the painting(s) by Delacroix and the tone poems of Franz Liszt because Pushkin’s verse drama Poltava, on which the opera is based, deals with the latter half of his life and career, after the famous ride bound prostrate on horseback, whereas the others culminate with that event. No longer Byron’s proud individualist flaunting social mores, Tchaikovsky’s Mazepa is the proud Hetman of a nascent Ukraine, seeking independence from Peter the Great's Russian hegemony through an alliance with Charles XII of Sweden, freedom-loving or traitorous, depending on how one views Ukrainian independence. Having experimented with Shakespearean tragedy in his Boris Godunov, Pushkin tries his hand at Schillerian tragedy with Mazepa. Tchaikovsky's libretto telescopes Pushkin’s characters, who transvocalize lines from Pushkin's narrator. The crucible of war catalyzes neochronotopes (new time-spaces) and a national catastrophe dissolves into unforgettable personal tragedy.

 Dr. John Pendergast has been teaching Russian and German language and literature at West Point since 2002 and became the Russian Program Director in 2019.  He holds a BA in Music from Birmingham-Southern College, an MA in Russian Language and Literature from the University of Arizona, and earned his MPhil and PhD in Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  His research explores Russian and German literature of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, especially works of music and theater. His most recent publication is Joan of Arc on the Stage and Her Sisters in Sublime Sanctity, from Palgrave-Macmillan in 2019.