AMSGNY Meetings

 

 Winter Meeting—January 22, 2022 Via Zoom.  All are welcome to attend.

The Zoom code is https://zoom.us/j/9453643107

 

2 – 3 PM        Ethnic Identities

Representation of Second-Generation Latin Americans in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Music.

Leanny Muñoz (University of California, Davis)

 “There’s a Little Bit of Irish in Sadie Cohn”: Irish-Jewish Partnerships in Early-Twentieth Century American Popular Culture

Danielle Roman (New York University)

 

3-3:15             Break

 

3:15-4:15       Popular Music Studies

Husky’s usage of the Bhairavi Scale and the Cathodic Harmonium: Where East meets West meets Rap

John David Vandevert (The University of Bristol, UK)

 

"The Angel of Doubt": Ancient Wisdom Poetry in the Music of the Punch Brothers

Hannah Porter Denecke (Florida State University)

 

4:15-4:30       Break

 

4:30-5:30       Music from the British Isles

“Haydn’s Symphonies Scored by Clementi.” A New Source of the London Symphonies.

Luca Lévi Sala (Manhattan College)

 

Under the Kilt: The Pipe Band as a Tool of Cultural Transmission

Erin Walker Bliss (University of Kentucky)

 Representation of Second-Generation Latin Americans in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Music.

Leanny Muñoz (University of California, Davis)

             We can turn to Bernstein/Sondheim’s West Side Story (1957) or Disney’s Coco (2017) as just a few examples of representation of Latin American identity within United States popular culture. As second-generation Latin American U.S. citizens, primarily of the millennial generation, begin to make up a large portion of media consumers, Latin American depictions have increased due to the rise of demand from this demographic of consumers. The most recent contribution to the musical and narrative representation of Latin Americans comes from Disney’s animated film Encanto (2021), which features original songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Encanto features a multigenerational Colombian family who have made a home in the mountains after leaving their previous town due to political turmoil. The film’s story and the lyrical content of the music acting as an allegory to the Latin American experience in the United States.

In this paper, I will discuss how Encanto and other musical works by Lin-Manuel Miranda point to a growing representation of second-generation Latin American identities in the U.S. Additionally, I will explore how Miranda’s compositions typically differentiate between generations via music. For example, the first-generation of family members have songs that feature vallenato, cumbia, and salsa, but Mirabel, her sisters, and their cousins, second-generation citizens of the town of ENcanto, heavily incorporate popular hip hop and pop musical styles found in current popular music. Furthermore, much of Miranda’s lyrical and narrative contributions address the anxieties and concerns of second-generation Latin Americans in the U.S. such as the crushing weight of expectations placed on older sisters in Latin American families, which I will read as representing the pressure to succeed in the U.S. while retaining tradition, as addressed in the song “Surface Pressure.”

 

Leanny Muñoz received her Master of Music from Louisiana State University. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts with a concentration in Fine and Performing Arts and a minor in Music Performance at the Louisiana Scholars’ College at Northwestern State University of Louisiana. Her primary research interests are in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Spanish and Latin American music, especially as related to nationalism, representations of race and gender, and other socio-political issues. Additionally, Leanny is interested in film music, the discourse of colonialism in music and the classroom, arts administration, and remaining an active vocalist.

 

“There’s a Little Bit of Irish in Sadie Cohn”: Irish-Jewish Partnerships in Early-Twentieth Century American Popular Culture

Danielle Roman (New York University)

 

Alfred Bryan and Jack Stern’s 1916 Tin Pan Alley hit “There’s a Little Bit of Irish in Sadie Cohn” follows a pattern emerging in this decade: depictions of intermarriage and romantic entanglement between Irish and Jewish characters in music and drama, often written by Irish-Jewish composer-lyricist collaborations. As these ethnic groups became fixtures in the popular music and theater scene in New York, cross-cultural interactions and misinterpretations were common tropes in popular song and on the stage. Songs like “It’s Tough When Izzy Rosenstein Loves Genevieve Malone” (1910) and “Yiddisha Luck and Irisha Love” (1911) explore contemporary anxieties surrounding intermarriage, race, and minoritarian status in American society. Following these songs’ successes, vaudeville and early musical theater Irish-Jewish collaborations such as those between Ned Harrigan and David Braham; George M. Cohan and Sam Harris; and George Burns and Gracie Allen played an integral role in defining American life on the popular stage. The celebratory idiom is most salient in Anne Nichols’ 1923 play Abie’s Irish Rose, which portrays the marriage of Abraham Levy and Rosemary Murphy, and the various prejudices they must overcome on the part of their communities. The immensely popular play, which was severely panned by critics, was turned into a novel (1927) and a movie (1928). It also spawned the successful film series The Cohens and the Kellys. However, this positive depiction of Irish-Jewish connection was particularly disparaged in the Irish and Jewish press, who felt their communities were being misunderstood and misrepresented on stage, regardless of the play’s good intent. Indeed, despite the partnerships displayed in popular culture of this period, ethnic newspapers paint a different story--one of continued underlying mistrust between these groups. In this paper, I attend to the nuances of this phenomenon in the site-specific context of New York in order to investigate negotiations of community in the quest for cultural assimilation. 

 

Danielle Roman is a second-year PhD student at New York University researching Irish diasporic musical networks and cross-Celtic relations. She obtained her Master of Philosophy degree from the University of Cambridge in 2020. 

 

Husky’s usage of the Bhairavi Scale and the Cathodic Harmonium: Where East meets West meets Rap

John David Vandevert (The University of Bristol, UK)

 

The legacy of The Mighty Five in the development of the “Russian” musical identity is unarguable. But what seems to be missing is the contemporary connection that binds the Russian 21st century and its musical thumbprint to the indelible influence of the 19th century “New Russian School” and their devotion to their fellow compatriot, realizing a national identity through musical means, and the (far) Eastern invocations of romanticized, Slavophile chimeras. Given, for the sake of abstraction, that the musical ecosphere of the post-post-Soviet, Russian epoch is no longer solely shaped by the proscriptive tastes of authoritarian strictures, intelligentic aesthetic codes, or top-down ideological shaping, “popular music” proclivities in Russia have largely Westernized and quickly assimilated into the rank-and-file of the “globalized hegemony of market capitalism.”  And yet, despite the post-Soviet scramble for Western cultural decadence in the 90s and early-mid 2000s, followed by the return to cogency following Medvedev and further awakening following the return of Putinian entrapment in the early 2010s, the influence of Kuchkist discourses are now a sociocultural staple and a calling-card of neo-Eurasianist dialectics. This is no more apparent than in one of the foremost preferred genres as of 2020, that being Russian Hip-Hop, seconded unsurprisingly to the folk song genre1. In my ongoing investigation into the presence of musical “Russianness” in Russian Hip-Hop’s rather cosmopolitanized but epochally apposite “intonational dictionary,” I seek to defend my deduction that this highly provocative genre has come to fully embody not only the Kuchkist proclivities of Exotic fascinations and self-imposed cultural antiquarianism, but the Belyayev Circle’s modalities of appropriative Westernism and tactful modernism. Using the song and music video “Revenge” by Buryatian rapper Husky as the lynchpin, the argument for expanding our understanding of the Kuchkist influence on contemporary Russian music will be explicated. 

 

John David Vandevert is a postgraduate candidate in Musicology at The University of Bristol, where he is studying Russian Hip-Hop's role in contemporizing the long-standing question of Russian Nationalism and the enigmatic construction of "narodnost," with a focus on how its musical identity has adopted the dialectic predilections of 18th and 19th century discourses. 

 

"The Angel of Doubt": Ancient Wisdom Poetry in the Music of the Punch Brothers

Hannah Porter Denecke (Florida State University)

 

Since winning “Best Folk Album” for All Ashore at the 2018 Grammys, the Brooklyn-based Punch Brothers have established themselves as a significant cultural influence in North America. Much of this album features political critique, yet it also includes personal vignettes related to family and parenthood. “The Angel of Doubt” is a unique track on the album, however. The piece itself is in an odd meter, often resulting in rhythmic units of seven or thirteen. This tension creates an unsettling backdrop for the dialogue between the narrator and a metaphorical antagonist who haunts him: the Angel of Doubt. Strikingly, the narrator resists the Angel of Doubt using quotations from the book of Ecclesiastes. This paper explores the interplay between the wisdom of Ecclesiastes and the Punch Brothers’ “The Angel of Doubt.”

At first listen, the song seems merely to chronicle the distress of a musician haunted by doubt in the late evening hours. The narrator himself seems to struggle with memories of his past, reminded that he used to spend his time “striving after wind,” and recollecting the feeling that “everything was meaningless.” The Angel of Doubt responds in rap-like spoken word, this character a metaphor for the doubt within the narrator’s own mind. Philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson provide a useful framework for understanding complex literary metaphors in their Metaphors We Live By (1980).            Jewish wisdom literature scholar Michael V. Fox’s commentary provides framework for understanding the poetry and metaphors specific to Ecclesiastes. For the Punch Brothers, this wisdom poetry spoke into the tension they felt with contemporary politics during the Trump administration period. Today, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to create global restlessness and malaise among musicians and artists everywhere. Indeed, there is no better time to ponder the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, as expressed in “The Angel of Doubt.”

 

Hannah Porter Denecke is a doctoral candidate at Florida State University. Her musicological interests focus on the ways that cultural factors are performed and understood in American music. She wrote her undergraduate honors thesis on the fin-de-siècle parlor music composer Carrie Jacobs-Bond, and her master’s thesis on the theological undertones of Vincent Persichetti’s 1970 inter-religious piece The Creation. Hannah’s interests are varied, but she finds coherence in their connection to North American publ

 

“Haydn’s Symphonies Scored by Clementi.” A New Source of the London Symphonies.

Luca Lévi Sala (Manhattan College)

Haydn’s twelve London Symphonies were composed between 1791 and 1795 and broadly and regularly performed during the Professional Concerts and the Salomon private series at Hanover Square in London. Arrangements of these symphonies were later published largely for different kinds of musical forces. Adaptations for keyboard, violin and violoncello of the first set of six of them were initially issued by Johan Peter Salomon—entered at Stationers’ Hall in 1796. The second set, entered at Stationers’ Hall registers was to come in 1797 and “printed for Mr Salomon the Proprietor.”

Only almost twenty years later, between around 1813 and 1816 Clementi & Co. (Clementi, Banger, Collard, Davis & Collard) published the first edition of Muzio Clementi’s adaptations of Haydn’s twelve London Symphonies. On 30 July 1813, the Morning Post advertised the first three arrangements of “Haydn’s Celebrated Symphonies Composed & Performed at M.r Salomon’s […]” for pianoforte, flute, violin and cello: the first one, the so-called ‘London’ symphony no. 104, alongside the appearance of the nos. 94 and 100, that is “the Surprise Symphony […] and the Military Symphony […].”

New evidence about Clementi’s preparation of these works might be revealed by a recently located autograph source, bearing the transcription of the whole set of the full scores of Haydn’s London Symphonies: “Haydn’s | Symphonies | scored by | Clementi” (no RISM, I-BGi, Fondo Piatti-Lochis, PREIS.H1.8764). An extensive and detailed codicological analysis of the two volumes constituting the source reveals new interesting evidence about its genesis, alongside adding further information about Clementi’s autographs, of which very little is known to date.

This source proves also useful in enlightening additional details about Clementi’s interest in studying, performing and arranging Haydn’s works, adding more information to the extensive literature about the Austrian composer and the history of the performance practice at the early XIX-Century.

 

Luca Lévi Sala PhD is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Manhattan College (NYC) and Visiting Scholar at New York University. He was Visiting Teaching Professor at Jagiellonian University in Cracow (2021) and at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (2020-2021), former Professeur associé at Université de Montréal (2017-2020), Visiting Researcher at New York University (2017) and Visiting Research Fellow at Yale University (2015-2016). He has published a range of articles and chapters, reviews and reports (serving as peer-reviewer as well) in various international books and refereed journals, including Early Music, Journal of Musicological Research, Notes, Revue de musicologie, Studi musicali, Journal of Jewish Identities, Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, Ad Parnassum Journal, Studia Chopinowskie, Musica Jagellonica, Eighteenth-Century Music, Analecta Musicologica, Oxford Bibliographies Online, MGG, Grove Music Online. His book Music and Politics in the Italian Fascist State in the 1930s: The View from the Press is committed to be published with Boydell & Brewer (Suffolk, UK).

 

Under the Kilt: The Pipe Band as a Tool of Cultural Transmission
Erin Walker Bliss (University of Kentucky)

       For Scots and non‐Scots alike, the sounds of the bagpipes and the pipe band serve as a cultural metaphor for Scottish identity, conjuring the material culture and romantic imagery of the kilted Highlander. Beginning in the 19th century, this nearly global association appears to have been constructed on a series of transformations of cultural practices throughout greater Britain and the lands of the Scottish diaspora, as the pipe band moved from military spheres to serve a range of civic and social purposes within Scotland. The ensemble’s appeal was rendered greater by the ideas of "tartanization" and "Celticism" that flourished during this period. These concepts were fueled by the romanticization of the Highlander in British literature, Queen Victoria's affinity for summer holidays at Balmoral, and the formation of Scottish and Celtic heritage societies embracing Highland dress, music, and sport. The primary goal of this paper will be to study the role of the pipe band in the construction and transformation of Scottish identity through an examination of the meanings, values, and musical practices that are built into ideas of "Scottishness," or, more generally, "Celticness," from the mid‐19th century through the present in the British Isles and North America. Touching on field research conducted with two regional pipe bands, Kentucky United Pipes & Drums and Knoxville Pipes & Drums, it will also raise far‐reaching questions concerning the nature of group and individual identity, as well as the ways in which identity functions and is recognized within and outside a particular cultural group.

 

Erin Walker Bliss is a full-time lecturer in World Music at the University of Kentucky. She holds both a DMA in Percussion Performance and a PhD in Musicology/ Ethnomusicology, and is a founding member of nief-norf, a contemporary music ensemble. Erin is also the Executive Director of the Central Music Academy, a non-profit music program that gives free private music lessons to kids who face financial barriers.