AMSGNY Meetings

 

20^th Century Topics

 

‘Disability style’ in Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson

Shannon McAlister (University of Connecticut)

 

The majority of Emily Dickinson’s poetry focuses on themes relating to nature, self-identity, death, and love. However, as her health conditions worsened with age, Dickinson’s writing was drastically impacted by the development of her disabilities. The impact that disability had on her poetry has become more evident based on recent research on the acknowledgement of her disabilities. Over time, many of Dickinson’s poems, and their portrayal of disability, have been set to music as art song or choral works.

In this presentation, I will explore the effects disability had on the aesthetics of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and how Joseph Straus’ concept of ‘disability style’ can be applied to Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson. The twelve songs illustrate extraordinary text-painting, as Copland tried to match the lyrical language of Dickinson’s poetry in his musical writing. Joseph Straus’ concept of ‘disability style’ can be understood as: “a perspective composers may adopt at any age, often in response to a personal experience of disability” (Straus, 2008). I hope to uncover if the concept of ‘disability style’ was inherently written in into the music of Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson based on the impact that disability had on Dickinson’s poetry.

 

Shannon McAlister is a second-year MA candidate and graduate teaching assistant in music theory at the University of Connecticut. Shannon is also working towards a Graduate Certificate in College Instruction through the NEAG School of Education at UConn. Her research areas include music theory pedagogy, and music and disability studies. At UConn, Shannon is currently teaching third and fourth semesters of Harmony to undergraduates. Previously, Shannon attended the University of Delaware where she earned a BM in Music Education with a concentration in Instrumental Music. She also completed a minor in Disability Studies. Shannon was also an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant for the Music Theory Department for two years of her undergraduate career. A native Long Islander, Shannon enjoys going to the beach, hiking, and exploring her new surroundings as she currently resides in Connecticut.

 

"Procession In Shout": Cecil Taylor's Staging of Adrienne Kennedy's A Rat's Mass  

                Michelle Aeojin Yom  (CUNY Graduate Center)

 

In March of 1976, avant-garde improviser Cecil Taylor staged surrealist playwright Adrienne Kennedy's 1967 play A Rat's Mass into an opera. Subtitled "Procession In Shout," Taylor drew from choreosonic practices of traditional Black communal gatherings to enact a "psychic poem" "metamorphized by 'Shout.'" The critics dismissed the work, complaining that Taylor had failed to maintain the brevity of Kennedy's one-act play. A Rat's Mass/Procession In Shout was never staged again, but film reels of the work survive in the La Mama Experimental Theater's Archive. In this presentation, I compare a transcription of the "libretto" to Kennedy's original script and show that Taylor changed the story's meta-narrative by replacing the concluding death scene with reference to an intertextual symbol of genesis. I also show that he blurred the fourth wall by directing attention to the audience's participation, and in effect, produced a form of possibility by enacting a reentry of the social form of the theater. I argue that A Rat's Mass/Procession In Shout offers a critique of the hegemony of chronometric time by layering different temporalities and connect Taylor's form of possibility to a thought that Nahum Dimitri Chandler has phrased as "a-logical logic of the originarity of the second time." From this perspective, the complaints of critics on the length of Taylor's opera can be read as a certain ineptitude in sensing/imagining beyond chronometric time.   

 

Michelle Aeojin Yom is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at The Graduate Center, CUNY.  She works on time and temporality in musical forms of the twentieth century with a particular focus on Cecil Taylor's improvisations in relation to writing, history, biography, and genealogy, using several methods including archival research, interviews, close reading, and hermeneutical analysis. The research includes cross-disciplinary experiments in the arts, liberatory methods of teaching, critical modalities of the theater, comparative analyses of rhythm, long-form solo improvisation, and the reception of free jazz. She is an organizing member of Out From Outside, a Mixcloud project, academic speaker series and monthly radio show that celebrates and studies black music, and is also a flutist and composer; when not dissertating, she is working on an opera based on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée.  

 

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19^th Century Topics

 

The Conflicting Conflicts of La Bohème

    Jeff S. Dailey (New York University)

 

La Bohème is the most popular opera in the world.  However, its popularity has caused it to be neglected and derided by critics and scholars since its premiere.  This study looks at the different conflicts inherent in the opera’s text and its existence.  First, it will look at the conflicts that arose at its genesis, then the critical out lash at it, then at what may be the source of all the problem—the structure of the subtly conflicted libretto, which, it will be shown, is more akin to a reverse Greek drama than a traditional opera libretto. 

 Jeff Dailey is the president of the AMSGNY.  Now happily retired, he devotes his time to research and performance activities.  His recording of Pipelare’s Missa L’Homme Armé, recorded under the auspices of the Early Music Foundation, will be released soon.  Publications released in the past year include pieces in Ars Lyrica, School Music News, and Playbill.  He is currently a Visiting Scholar at NYU.

 

Johannes Brahms, Connoisseur of Graphic Art 

    Styra Avins (American Brahms Society)

    Johannes Brahms a connoisseur and collector of painting and drawing? His engagement with the graphic art of Max Klinger has been explored in some detail, mostly in German-language journals, but scant attention has been paid to what was a lively and life-long interest, the visual arts in their various forms of painting, drawing, and etching. I document his interest with evidence starting with his earliest correspondence to and from friends, including Clara Schumann and Julius Otto Grimm, continuing on to his first stay in Düsseldorf, then Karlsruhe, and continuing throughout his life. Some names are well known to us now, others less so: Jacques Callot – so important to E.T.A. Hoffmann -- William Hogarth, Anselm Feuerbach, Julius Allgeyer, Alfred von Menzel, Daniel Nicklaus Chodowiecki, Arnold Böcklin, Henri Fantin-Latour, and Max Klinge.
      The larger issues of the day, particularly in France and Germany, involved the possibility of creating “musical” paintings, paintings which could evoke the kinds of non-verbal emotional responses more usually associated with music, at the very moment that Music of the Future and the Gesamtkunstwerk, both involving literary content, were being hotly discussed. Other artistic styles of the time included the continued production of paintings depicting classical historical scenes and tableaus influenced by Greek mythology, and genre paintings, scenes of everyday life.  Brahms’s interests encompassed them all.   I suggest what they may have had in common with each other and with Brahms, the person as well as his music.

 

Styra Avins was born and educated in New York City. Past Adjunct Professor of Music History at Drew University, she is a professional cellist with an academic degree from the City College of New York, undergraduate studies at the Juilliard School, and a Masters Degree in Cello from the Manhattan School of Music.  Her involvement with Brahms’s music led to authorship of Johannes Brahms: Life and Letters (Oxford, 1997), and chapters in Performing Brahms: Early Evidence of Performing Style (Cambridge, 2003), Brahms and his World (Princeton, 2009), and Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall (Cambridge, 2014).  Recent publications include ‘Myth in Brahms Biography, or What I Learned from Quantum Mechanics’ in Fontes Artis Musicae and “Brahms, Beethoven, and a Reassessment of the Famous Footsteps” in Nineteenth Century Music Review.  Forthcoming is ‘Joseph Joachim and His Jewish Dilemma’ in The Creative Worlds of Joseph Joachim,  (Boydell & Brewer) and the chapter “Joseph Joachim, Herman Grimm, and American Transcendentalism:  Encounter with Ralph Waldo Emerson”, in  Joseph Joachim, Identity/Identitäten, Olms Verlag.   Styra serves on the Board of Directors of the American Brahms Society. 

 

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French Topics

 

Disinformation in Mass Media: Gluck, Piccinni, and the Journal de Paris

    Beverly Jerold

In a venture to establish a daily paper that was a commercial enterprise, unlike the small-scale literary journals of the day, the Journal de Paris (JP) was founded in January 1777 using controversy to attract a large readership. After an encounter with the moral censor, it turned to opera as a smokescreen. Christoph Willibald Gluck’s works held a near monopoly at the Paris Opéra (1774-77), generating a large profit. In 1773, J.-B. de Laborde received official approval to open negotiations with Niccolò Piccinni, who arrived in Paris at the end of 1776. Those who wanted the Opéra to be open to all deserving composers pressed for Piccinni’s work to be heard. To influence public opinion against permitting an Italian work at the Paris Opéra, the JP launched a year-long series of anonymous insults, ridicule, insinuation, and lies against two respected writers: Jean-François Marmontel, Piccinni’s librettist, and Jean-François de La Harpe, editor of the Journal de politique et de littérature. Their mild criticism was balanced with many favorable observations about Gluck’s work.  Later, the anonymous writers proved to be mainly François Arnaud and J.-B.-A. Suard. The influence of a daily paper with no competitors was used to discredit the reputations of men who had little with which to defend themselves. Yet a clever stratagem led posterity to make them the aggressors. Music was only a pretext to attract a readership for the JP and protect Gluck’s domination at the Opéra—a campaign that created enmity and deep divisions where none had existed before.

 Beverly Jerold’s recent monographs: Disinformation in Mass Media: Gluck, Piccinni and the Journal de Paris, RMA Monographs (Routledge, 2021), a political drama; The Complexities of Early Instrumentation: Winds and Brass (Brepols, 2015), efforts to help composers avoid instruments’ limitations; and Music Performance Issues: 1600-1900 (Pendragon, 2016), a reprint of 19 articles on various topics. Articles include: The Musical Times (2021/2020); Journal of Musicological Research (2017/2018); Acta Musicologica (2016); The Early Keyboard Sonata in Italy and Beyond (Brepols, 2016); and Early Music (2014). Temperament is treated in the Dutch Journal of Music Theory (2007) and Music Theory & Analysis (2015).

 

Wind Music in a Coal Mining Town: A Far-Reaching Tradition at the Valenciennes Conservatoire

    Lacey Golaszewski (SUNY Fredonia)

When musicologists explore Western art music traditions from remote regions, they often study these practices in terms of local context. However, this focus on particularity does not always tell the whole story. In this paper, I argue that smaller enclaves can have wider implications. To make this argument, I turn to the town of Valenciennes, France and its Conservatoire. Located in coal mining country, the two have maintained an outsized classical music tradition and held sway over wind performance and literature globally.

To demonstrate this phenomenon, this paper first provides an overview of the Valenciennes wind-playing heritage. It then shows how this tradition influenced wind performance more broadly via connections to the Paris Conservatoire and the Garde Républicaine, plus its significance for wind literature worldwide via its director, Eugène Bozza. In the process, it draws upon archival work conducted at the Conservatoire, plus interviews with Valenciennes historian, Jean-Claude Poinsignon, recent Conservatoire director, Thierry Thibault, Conservatoire professor, André Ratte, and Conservatoire alumna, Cécile Bozza Delplace. The paper ultimately illustrates how Valenciennes constituted a significant center for wind music, while challenging our notions of place in music historiography.

Lacey Golaszewski received her Ph.D. in historical musicology and music theory from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she previously earned degrees in music performance, music education, and French. As a pedagogue, she teaches French language, literature, culture, philosophy, and educational methodology at the State University of New York at Fredonia. Her research interests include aesthetics, critical theory, twentieth century French art music, nineteenth century Russian ballet music, woodwind chamber music, and the effects of woodwind performance on personal health. Outside of academic work, she is active as a clarinetist, saxophonist, arranger, composer, poet, and visual artist.