AMSGNY Meetings

The period of late 19^th c. Fin de siècle was, on one end, the catalyst for which years of deep-set acrimony about the slow degradation of Europe’s high-culture was given room to stretch its legs, thoughts such as, “This is the road to the abyss, by way of liberalism, Jewry, Mammonism, socialism, pessimism, anarchism and nihilism” and the desecration of the Natural Sciences leading to ‘atheism, materialism and social degradation rather than stability and the sure path to progress depicting such resolute fears. Percolating into almost every artistic discipline, internationally observable from Ireland with Oscar Wilde’s satirization of lost purpose ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ [1895] to Germany with Nietzsche’s critical publication against the prevailing doctrine of Christian escapism, ‘Twilight of the Idols’ [1889], ‘the pulse of life’ stood a very real chance at being destroyed by the careless abandon of a newly liberated humanity. However, there was another stream, that being of a more forward-looking, optimistic side which saw the transition into the new decade as an opportunity for cross-societal development and full embrace of modernist trappings, within the artistic variant taking the form of an immoderate Romanticism, or Decadent Romanticism, where “person is transformed into beautiful, beyond the law.”  This dichotomous make-up formed the grosser Belle Epoque period of late French life and more importantly served as the socio-cultural backdrop for Maurice Ravel’s atypical piano work [later orchestrated] ‘Pavane pour une Infante défunte’ [1899]. Using a previously conducted scene by scene analysis of Director Beverly Barroff’s 20^th c. experimental, dance short-film which used the work as its accompaniment, bolstered by biographical and hermeneutical evidence and observations, I seek to suppose that through the short-film’s reinterpretation of Pavane’s original plot, suffused with the naturalism of Art Nouveau, the work gains a more truthful alternate narrative. A narrative which, despite there being no ‘factual’ truth to it, positions Ravel within French society as an active, receptive player much more than what would be allowed using the work’s original conception.

John David Vandevert is a graduate of Westminster Choir College in Vocal Performance; however, he is currently engaged as an independent Music Researcher and Writer. Interested in how music coalesces with life, much of his work deals with 'hearing' music as an intonational expression of socio-cultural dynamics. He has written on an eclectic range of topics, including Soviet music methodology, Hip-Hop, Samuel Barber, and is currently working on a paper about Ravel's latent embodiment of fin-de-siecle in 'Pavane for a Dead Princess.' He has given previous national and international talks, in 2020 participating in Zagreb's Academy of Music Future of Musicology Conference, while in 2021 appearing in American Musicology Society's New York Chapter Winter Meeting talking about the Asafievian conceptualization of 'New Listener.' He currently works as Grant Research Coordinator for Opera NexGen and is applying for a Master's in Musicology, with hopes to begin in the fall of 2021. 

Business Meeting  11 AM – 11:30 AM

Session II—Music and Theatre  11:30 AM – 12:30 PM

Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor, Donizetti’s Lucia, and History’s Janet Dalrymple: Magic and Music, Villains and Volition

Shoshana Milgram Knapp (Virginia Tech)

         ‘Tis two centuries since Sir Walter Scott published The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), a novel he completed while suffering from an illness he did not expect to survive. It is permeated by myth and mist, by destiny and despair.  Inspired by the family legend of  Janet Dalrymple, Scott’s novel preserves a political interpretation, while emphasizing the supernatural, along with the malevolent plotting of Janet’s witch-like mother, Lady Stair. Gaetano Donizettis’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), with a libretto by Salvatore Cammarano, re-imagines Scott’s magic as arguably plausible. It treats the surrender to determinism, moreover, as itself a choice.

          Cammarano streamlined the story, sidelining the lovers’ parents and the politics, while omitting or minimizing such characters as Jedediah Cleishbottom, Peter Pattieson, Dick Tinto, and—notably—the villainous Lady Ashton. Scott portrayed Lady Ashton as narratively prominent and triumphant. Cammarano prefers to emphasize the courage of Lucy, in her tragic but resolute embrace of autonomy.

          In Scott’s novel, the entire narrative is mired and moored in the past, twice removed from the present, transmitted by Cleishbotham from the writings of a deceased school teacher. The opera takes a different approach, and one that coheres with Scott’s respect for Shakespeare. The opera, by genre and by performance, situates the past events in the audience’s present—in the tradition of Shakespeare, whose Macbeth, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet are mentioned in The Bride.

Shoshana Milgram Knapp is an associate professor in the Department of English at Virginia Tech. Her main research focus is nineteenth-century fiction—American, British, French, and Russian—with some attention to related twentieth-century writers. She also work with the Hebrew Bible, film, and non-fictional prose. In studying the responses of one writer to another, she has published on such subjects as Leo Tolstoy’s reading of George Eliot, George Eliot’s reading of Victor Hugo, Anton Chekhov’s reading of Herbert Spencer, Harold Pinter’s cinematic adaptation of a novel by John Fowles, and the impact of William James and Fyodor Dostoevsky on Ursula K. Le Guin. Some of her research is a kind of literary detection. Knapp wrote the first scholarly articles about the mysterious “Victoria Cross” (whose dates—1868-1952—and actual name had never before been documented). Knapp's long-term study of the life of Ayn Rand up to 1957 (i.e., from her birth in St. Petersburg, Russia, to the publication of her final novel, Atlas Shrugged) involves the examination of texts, the exploration of the relationships between texts, and archival detective work regarding the facts and principles of her public and private life. 

Meredith Willson and the Reconciliation of Cultural Hierarchy in The Music Man

Jim Delorey (University of Southern California)

Characterizations of Meredith Willson’s Broadway musical The Music Man (1957) tend to focus on its nostalgia, innocence, and Midwestern-ness, interpretations predicated on Willson’s own embodiment of the same qualities in his public persona. I offer an alternate interpretation of both musical and composer. Archival documents suggest that The Music Man contains sophisticated commentary on the hierarchy of highbrow and lowbrow culture. In the context of intellectual history, they reveal Willson’s position within a national debate about cultural hierarchy, a debate that, after World War II, had political and professional ramifications for many artists and musicians. His position is evident in the personification of lowbrow and highbrow in the characters Harold Hill and Marion Paroo, respectively. The reconciliation of both the characters and the songs at the musical’s end is a testament to Willson’s enduring optimistic belief that popular and classical music could also be reconciled through the commonality of melody.

Jim Delorey is a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California’s (USC) Thornton School of Music in the Department of Music History and Literature. Jim is finalizing his dissertation, “Cultural Hierarchy and the Persistence of Optimism in Meredith Wilson’s America.” His research areas of interest include the intersection of 20^th century American popular music and intellectual history, musical theater and opera, and American experimental composers.  Before pursuing his doctorate, Jim, a trained percussionist, taught music and performed with various orchestras and musical theater groups in the Boston area. Jim received his Bachelors of Music and Masters of Music from the University of Massachusetts.

Break 12:30-12:45

Session III—Twentieth Century Topics 12:45 PM-1:45 PM

‘Pompously oblivious’: Schizophrenic Casella and the Semantic Axes of Fascist Racist Rhetoric in Music Criticism in the 1930s.

Luca Lévi Sala (Manhattan College, NYC and Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland)

Debates and polemics published between around 1926 and 1927 in Critica fascista (1923-1943), the fortnightly journal founded and directed by Giuseppe Bottai, were crucial in helping define the way in which Fascist intelligentsia tried to establish new aesthetic standards for both Fascist art and culture. During the early 1930s the regime did not explicitly address and ratify formal directives regarding musical press and barely intervened in repressing musical polemics and debates hosted in specialized journals and magazines. This left the door open for various elements of music criticism to forge their own open interdisciplinary interpretations and debates and to endorse political narratives. Despite the lack of explicit pressure, the writings and polemics of various critics would often go above and beyond what was required in order to conform with the rigid rules of state politics, sometimes providing an ideological or aesthetic basis for even more violent and well-organized cultural cleansing. A gradual but solid transformation of the tools of the language became mandatory so as to push elitist semantic formulations into line with official propaganda. The role of the press, as highlighted by Bardi on the Annuario della stampa, in 1931, became crucial in “recording” and spreading the rhetoric of the nationalistic lexicography, with the aim of better driving “vigilant polemics […] in structuring the Mussolinian thought.” Some scholars have tried to see Casella and his late output as a paradigm of Fascist propaganda, others polemically still justify his writings at the light of a political opportunistic behavior. This paper aims to sketch a clearer context about Casella’s writings at the light of his political compliance.

Luca Sala is the Articles Editor for Ad Parnassum. A Journal on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Instrumental Music.  He teaches at Manhattan College and Jagiellonian University.

Free Jazz and Jamaaladeen Tacuma's Harmolodic Bass Guitar

Scott Gleason Grove Music Online

            In the mid-1970s Jamaaladeen Tacuma burst onto the free jazz scene as a member of Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time. In order to accommodate “free jazz” to Tacuma’s bass guitar playing, however, we must redefine free jazz as including funk, rock ‘n roll, rhythm and blues, and the blues in its sway. In so doing, we follow Amiri Baraka in his famous 1966 essay, “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music).”

“Harmolodics” is the system of “compositional improvising” and musico-social relationships Coleman began developing while working with Prime Time. In this talk, I use embodied, performed transcription and analysis of selected Tacuma bass guitar lines to argue that the same in the changing of Tacuma’s music is the strategic deployment of repetitions and sequences of relatively short bass guitar licks—Coleman proclaimed Tacuma, “the master of the sequence”—within a harmolodic, Black context, and that Tacuma’s playing changes how we think about free jazz.

Scott Gleason received the PhD from Columbia University. He Co-Chairs the Society for Music Theory’s History of Theory Special Interest Group and edits for Grove Music Online, The Open Space Magazine, and Perspectives of New Music. His writings appear in those publications and in Filigrane, Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa, Notes, Philosophy and the Public Realm, Tacet, and Theoria. His research treats the history of music theory and the intersection of music and philosophy, and he writes analyses of new musics which interrogate the line between jazz and the avant-garde. His book project historicizes the Princeton School of composer-theorist-improvisers.