Winter Meeting--February 11, 2023 at Columbia University
0 Comments Published by AMSGNY President on Tuesday, January 24, 2023 at 6:43 PM.
The winter meeting of The Greater New York Chapter of the American Musicological Society will take place on February 11, 2023 at Columbia University.
It will be held in room 622 Dodge, which is where we have met in past gatherings at Columbia.
You will need to enter from College Walk, up the steps, to the left, into the main door of Dodge, which is actually on the third floor above campus level. A map of the campus is here: http://www.columbia.edu/files/columbia/content/morningsidemap_2015aug.pdf
The building is right near the 116th stop on the #1 train.
11AM-12 noon
Session I--Lecture Recital
From Theory to Practice: Microtones in Italian music from
Marchetto to Matteo da Perugio
Solomon Guhl-Miller (Rutgers University)
With performers Dongmyung Ahn and Christa Patton (both
of Queens College)
12-12:30--Lunch
12:30-1:30
Session II—Ukranian Music
Ukraine’s New Music Diplomacy: Resisting
Neo-imperialism in the 21 st century
Oksana Nesterenko (Union College)
Decolonizing the Ukrainian Heritage of Russian
National Opera: Igor and Mazepa as Case
Studies
John Pendergast (West Point)
1:45-2:00—Break
2-3:30
Session III—Player Pianos and Jazz
Out in Front: A Closer Look at the American Cabinet Piano-Player
William E. Hettrick (Hofstra
University)
A Salute to Topic Theory: Exploring the Edythe
Baker Rollography, 1919-1926
Artis Wodehouse
Scott Gray Douglass (Columbia University)
From Theory to
Practice: Microtones in Italian music from Marchetto to Matteo da Perugio
Solomon Guhl-Miller (Rutgers
University)
With performers Dongmyung
Ahn and Christa Patton (both of Queens College)
How sharp are the sharps in 14 th century music? While French theorists measure notes in their
monochord divisions using Pythagorean tuning and English theorists vacillated between
Pythagorean tuning and justly tuned thirds, Italian theorists from Marchetto to Ciconia followed
a division in which sharps were to be played approximately a quarter tone sharper, particularly
when the interval they created was a third or a sixth and that interval resolved to a perfect
consonance. However, at the beginning of the 15 th century theorists such as Ugolino and
Prosdocimo abandoned the theories of the raised sharp in favor of French Pythagorean tuning.
Prosdocimo dismissed Marchetto’s tuning in the following way: “Let us exclude these moderns
then, along with their Marchettus, who disseminated such impossible and erroneous things in
music.” (Musica Speculativa, ed. Herlinger, 218) What is curious about this statement is that it
implies that multiple composers are still using Marchetto’s system even in Prosdocimo’s day.
The question is then posed, which repertoires may have employed Marchetto’s tuning?
Marchetto gives us a key when he shows us that F#s are sharped by approximately a quarter
tone, while Bs are not sharped. Any repertoire or composer that employed the B-F# fifth as a
consonance either on an accented beat or in a cadence would likely not be using Marchetto’s
tuning as that interval would be about a quarter tone higher than a perfect fifth and would be
shrill to the ear. If on the other hand, the interval was avoided, it may have been because
Marchetto’s tuning was meant to be used. The results of a survey through the series Polyphonic
Music of the Fourteenth Century focusing on repertoires of the early to mid-fourteenth century
revealed that the B-F# fifth appeared in 2% of the Italian secular repertoire while it appeared in
approximately 30% of the English and 50% of the French repertoires. It is difficult to view this
as anything but a conscious avoidance of the interval on the part of Italian composers.
Marchetto’s “Ave Regina” motet and Landini’s works can all be performed using Marchetto’s
system and for that reason part of the program includes Marchetto’s motet as well as Landini’s
famous “Non avra ma pieta.” Because of the limited range of accidentals in this repertoire
consisting of Eb, Bb, F#, C#, and G#, keyboard instrumentalists, or in this case the harp, may
tune the three sharped pitches up accordingly and perform these works without any need for split
keys.
By the end of the century two important changes in sharp practice occurred. First, accidentals
frequently expanded beyond the five standard accidentals to include Abs D#s and sometimes
A#s. This means that if the music were to use Marchetto’s system, the composers would either
have to adjust the pitches used, replacing a G# for an Ab or Eb for a D# but not use both in the
same piece, or if a keyboard player was intended, employ a split keyboard. The other change that
frequently occurred in the works of Matteo da Perugio, but also appear in other works in MSS
Chantilly and ModA, is that sharps started not resolving to the pitch above them and could be
used as part of a resting consonance as either a third or a fifth. Both of these practices imply not
only that Marchetto’s system likely wasn’t used for those pieces, but also that tempered, more
consonant, non-Pythagorean thirds might have been employed. If Marchetto’s system was to be
employed in pieces where these features appear like “Helas Avril,” a differentiation would have
to be made in the notation between an F# that functioned as part of a consonance and a raised F#
that functioned as a cadential dissonance, likely through an altered sharp sign.
In the case of the theorist-composers Philipoctus de Caserta and Johannes de Ciconia, who both
wrote about raised sharps, neither composer used sharps on a resting consonance in their secular
music and if sharps outside the standard F#, C#, and G# were used, such as in Ciconia’s “Una
Panthera” when a D# is used, Ebs are not used in the piece, so split keys would not be necessary
on a keyboard and it could be performed on a harp without separate strings for the Eb and D#.
However, Perugia frequently used all of these forward-looking features in his music, and in the
music that employs many of these features like “Helas Avril” the scribe of ModA also
differentiates sharps by employing a variety of signs, from the sharp sign to natural signs with
dots in them. While much work remains to be done on what these signs may mean, one of the
signs frequently associated with Marchetto’s raised sharp is the natural sign with four dots in it
representing the four out of five parts of the tone by which the tone is raised, and this sign is used
in “Helas Avril” only on cadences before perfect consonances, exactly where they should appear
if those pitches were meant to use Marchetto’s system, meanwhile other sharp and natural signs
occur on pitches that do not require resolution. This evidence suggests that Perugio intended
Marchetto’s sharps to be used on cadential moments, and other sharps to be used on consonant
passages.
The program represents what could be considered three phases of the use of Marchetto’s
accidentals in Italian polyphony: an initial phase represented by the work of Marchetto and
Landini, which are short enough so the audience can hear them in both tuning systems, a middle
phase with works by Caserta and Ciconia, theorist-composer followers of Marchetto, and a final
phase represented by Perugia, who inhabits both the worlds of Trecento polyphony with its
raised sharps and the early Renaissance’s consonant thirds and sixths in the same piece.
Program Performed by
duet Duos Custos
(Equal Temperament
portion)
Marchetto de Padua:
Ave Regina-Mater Innocencie 2.40
Francesco Landini:
Non Avra 1.50
(Marchetto tuning
portion)
Marchetto de Padua:
Ave Regina-Mater Innocencie 2.40
Francesco Landini:
Non Avra 1.50
Philipoctus de
Caserta: Par le grant senz d’adriane 5.20
Johannes de Ciconia:
Una Panthera 5.30
Matteo da Perugio:
Helas Avril 4.10
Biographies:
Solomon Guhl-Miller teaches music history at Rutgers
University, Westminster Choir college, Temple University, and University of
Hartford. He has published articles and presented papers on a wide range of
topics from Ancient Greek music to Contemporary Art Music Criticism. Recently,
he received a digital humanities grant from the NEH to complete the project:
Ars Antiqua Online: A Digital Edition of Thirteenth Century Polyphony.
Christa Patton, historical harpist and early
wind specialist, has performed throughout the Americas, Europe, and Japan with
many of today’s premier early music ensembles including Piffaro the Renaissance
Band, Early Music New York, Boston Camerata, The King’s Noyse, Folger Consort,
Newberry Consort, Apollo’s Fire, Parthenia, ARTEK and Chatham Baroque to name a
few. Christa has served on the faculty of Rutgers University and the Graduate
Center at CUNY. She is also the director of the Baroque Opera Workshop at
Queens College, a workshop specializing in period-specific performance practice
of 17th century musical drama.
Early string specialist Dongmyung Ahn is
a performer, educator, and scholar who performs regularly with Pegasus, the
Raritan Players, the Sebastians, and Tenet. Dongmyung is the director of
the Queens College Baroque Ensemble and has taught music history at New York
University, Queens College, Rutgers University, and Vassar College. She
received her PhD in musicology at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Duo Custos is an ensemble that specializes
in music of the fourteenth century. With the intabulations of the Faenza
Codex as inspiration, Christa Patton and Dongmyung Ahn create unique tapestries
of sound that evoke the rich medieval world, using instruments, innovative
musicianship, and passionate scholarship. They have performed on the
Sacred Music Series at Columbia University, Midtown Concerts at the Gotham
Early Music Scene, Grace Farms Foundation, and have taken part in a residency
at Avaloch Farm Institute, New Hampshire.
Ukraine’s New Music
Diplomacy: Resisting Neo-imperialism in the 21 st century
Oksana
Nesterenko (Union College)
This presentation, which is a revised version of that given at the national AMS meeting, examines musical works by Ukrainian composers, created in response to the
Revolution of Dignity, the hybrid war in the Donbas region, and the full-scale invasion that
started on February 24, 2022.
The first composition, Lithos for electronics (The Stone, 2014-2019) by Ostap Manulyak,
includes manipulated sounds of gunshots recorded in February 2014 when the police killed a
hundred of peaceful protesters. While the piece memorializes the event of resistance, the
composer also reflects on the social changes which were fueled by the success of the protests,
stating that “as new stones appear when lava melts different materials, so a new democratic
society appeared in Ukraine after the Revolution of Dignity, which united people of different
ethnicities and persuasions.” The second composition, Punctum Reditum (2016) by Alla
Zagaykevych, was commissioned by Ensemble Megaphon – an international collective based in
Germany – for their project “History of a Soldier.” This piece for clarinet, violin, accordion and
electronics includes a multimedia component with poetry excerpts from Bertolt Brecht’s War
Primer and from a collection Life of Maria by Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan. The final
composition, Mariupol (2022) by Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko, is an open work which
has undergone several transformations between its first version, composed in February, and its
most recent version, performed in December. Originally composed for dulcimer and a
microtonally retuned bandura, it is dedicated to the city of Mariupol that resisted the Russian
occupation during the war in Donbas and was destroyed during the full-scale invasion.
While exhibiting one recurring theme – the composers’ desire to tell the world about the current
events in their country – these works illustrate how the escalation of military conflict with its
impact on civilian casualties has changed their ideas about creating music during the war.
Oksana Nesterenko is a musicologist specializing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music.
She earned a PhD in Music History and Theory at Stony Brook University in 2021 and presently
teaches at Union College. Her current book project, A Forbidden Fruit? Sacred Music in the
USSR before its Fall, explores concert music with religious and spiritual themes, composed in
five Soviet cities: Moscow, Kyiv, Leningrad, Tallinn and Yerevan. Her writing has been
published in Perspectives of New Music, Yale Journal of Music & Religion, Musicology Now
and other publications. She hosts the podcast Extended Techniques and serves on the advisory
board of Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival in New York.
Decolonizing the Ukrainian Heritage of Russian
National Opera: Igor and Mazepa as Case Studies
John Pendergast (West Point)
In Borodin’s Prince Igor and Tchaikovsky’s Mazepa, we find Russian imperial composers creating what many Russians think of as “Russian national operas,” yet the historical content of each opera is based on moments of history which took place in Ukraine involving figures prominent in Ukrainian history. While it is objectively significant to reconsider these works in light of the recent war in Ukraine and Russia’s horrific reevaluation of its relationship to Ukraine, such reconsideration is further merited by the erudition both composers reveal with respect to the elements of Ukrainian nationalism inherent in each work. One may hazard to say that Borodin and Tchaikovsky, both staunch monarchists, understood the important distinction between imperialist requirements and nationalist aspirations and demonstrated their understanding of this distinction in their sympathetic and sophisticated approach to their compositions. This erudition is revealed in the music provided to the characters, both those seen as villainous like Mazepa, and ostensible heroes like Prince Igor.
John Pendergast, Associate Professor and Program Director of Russian at West Point, writes about Russian and German music and letters and serves on the Executive Committee of the MLA Opera and Musical Performance Forum. His book Joan of Arc on the Stage (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) was a Springer Nature 2019 Highlight. Most recently, he co-authored “Enhancing the Foreign Language Classroom through Experiential Learning,” which appeared in Teaching and Learning the West Point Way (Routledge 2021).
Out in Front: A Closer Look at the American Cabinet Piano-Player
William E. Hettrick (Hofstra University)
Coffee-table picture books and other publications on this subject get it wrong on several counts. This paper aims to set the record straight with documented facts, including the correct genealogy of self-playing piano mechanisms, which many authors misconstrue. American piano manufacturers in the 1880s resisted the application of automatic devices to their instruments, so the makers of these mechanisms adapted them instead to reed organs. Thus the “Symphony” was made by the Wilcox & White Organ Co. of Meriden, CT, and the “Aeolian” by the eponymous company in New York. In the 1890s, internal players began to appear in upright pianos. Wilcox & White offered to install their model, called the “Angelus,” into customers’ pianos in their factory, but this proved commercially impractical. Their solution was to create external players designed to be placed in front of existing pianos and to move their keys by mechanical fingers. These first came on the market in May 1897. This type of piano-player was known as the “cabinet” or “external” variety (the childish term “push-up” is not documented before 1926 and has no historical validity). Aeolian followed in April 1898 with its own cabinet player, bearing the trade-name “Pianola,” which soon became a generic term signifying all piano-players. Many more were made during the heyday of the external player up to 1905, after which began a sharp decline in favor of internal players in “player-pianos.” The last-known external players were introduced as late as 1921 by the Welte-Mignon Corp. in New York, furnished with stylish cabinetry. Altogether, I have identified forty brands of American cabinet players, made by twenty-nine companies. All are listed in my handout, which also includes facsimiles of representative advertising.
Recent publications by William E. Hettrick include Johann Herbeck, Mass in E Minor (A-R Editions, 2019); “Johann Herbeck’s Edition of Choral Works by Franz Schubert: History and Analysis,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 16 (2019); and The American Piano Industry: Episodes in the History of a Great Enterprise (Pendragon Press, 2020). In production are Johann Herbeck, Selected Sacred Works for Mixed Chorus and Men’s Chorus with Accompanying Instruments (A-R Editions) and a greatly expanded article on the subject of the present paper, extending the coverage to Europe (Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society).
A Salute to Topic Theory: Exploring the Edythe Baker Rollography, 1919-1926
Artis Wodehouse (Independent
Scholar)
Study of popular American piano rolls created and sold between 1905 and 1925 represents a significant addition to our understanding of the world-wide impact of entirely new American musical genres: ragtime, blues, early jazz, and Broadway song. Mechanized production of the player piano and piano rolls made it possible for these new and wildly popular musics to reach the public on an enormous scale. Phonograph disc recordings and radio were developing during the same time, but due to a number of factors, the player piano and piano rolls remained the essential drivers in disseminating these musical innovations up to 1925.
A complete entertainment package, Edythe Baker (1899-1971) — who was also a beautiful, white American virtuoso pianist — was an accomplished composer, singer and dancer. She grew up in the Kansas City area. It was there and in other Mid-West locations that she heard and absorbed elements of African-American ragtime and the blues. When she arrived in New York City at age 20, talent scouts immediately recognized her unique assimilation of these emerging popular stylings (particularly the blues) which had become wildly popular by 1920. In New York, she was propelled to the upper echelon of the entertainment industry, appearing as piano soloist, stage performer (singing and dancing), and in making over 70 piano roll recordings from 1919 to 1926.
Baker was signed to make piano rolls for the Aeolian company, (the behemoth player piano and piano roll manufacturer of the day) shortly after arriving in New York. Aeolian initially marketed her as a ragtime and blues player, but, as her live performance career in New York developed additional stylings, Aeolian broadened her roll work to include a greater variety of popular genres and procedures.
The paper will trace the parade of emerging archetypal popular styles Baker rapidly assimilated and used in her piano roll work. The analysis will rely on some elements of topic theory, an approach developed by the late Leonard Ratner.
Biography
Pianist,
harmoniumist and pianolist Artis Wodehouse has devoted her career to preserving
and disseminating neglected but valuable music and instruments from the past,
with an emphasis on American music. Cited by the NYTimes as “savior of the old
and neglected”, she received a National Endowment grant that propelled her into production of CDs
and published transcriptions of recorded performances and piano rolls made by
George Gershwin, Jelly Roll Morton and Zez Confrey. Wodehouse performs on a
representative group of antique reed organs and harmoniums, antique pianos and
a foot-pump player piano. She holds a BM from the Manhattan School of Music, an
MM from Yale. She received her doctorate from Stanford University where her
dissertation advisor was Leonard Ratner. An analysis of popular piano rolls of
the 1910-20s fits nicely into Ratner’s topic theory that centers on an
examination of types and styles for expressive musical discourse.
The
Social Aesthetics of Duke Ellington’s Controversial Suite
Scott Gray Douglass (Columbia
University)
Alongside the masterpiece “A Tone Parallel to Harlem,” Duke Ellington premiered his lesser-known Controversial Suite (consisting of two movements, “Before My Time” and “Later”) on January 21, 1951, at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House during a fundraising benefit for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Exactly one week later, Ellington canceled his band’s scheduled performance at the Mosque (the civic theater in Richmond, Va.) due to a nascent boycott of the Mosque’s segregated seating policy by the Richmond branch of the NAACP. The boycott’s impact was first felt on January 16 at a Mosque performance by Marian Anderson. While the Duke railed to the national press about lost revenues, NAACP executive secretary Walter White urgently queried the association’s southern branches as to their stance on Richmond’s principled but unilateral activism. Responses flew in as branches weighed in on Richmond branch president Dr. J. M. Tinsley’s bold assertion that, “in my opinion a statement emanating from Miss Anderson to the effect that she will no longer hold engagements before segregated audiences would immensely aid us in our efforts where they regard the elimination of racial segregation in public assembly.”
By the
end of 1951, the matter of segregation at the Mosque had landed in federal
court and Ellington’s Controversial Suite had landed on record
at Columbia, though this captivatingly strange piece—one part time capsule, one
part crystal ball—was bumped from the original Ellington Uptown LP
by the more elegant “Harlem,” now considered a classic. A piece initially
conceived to depict the musical controversy between Dixieland and modern jazz,
the Controversial Suite takes on a deeper artistic resonance
in the Ellington canon when analyzed alongside the Richmond Mosque theater
boycott in terms of their shared and contrasting social aesthetics. As the
Richmond NAACP and their allies—including attorneys who would go on to
argue Brown v. Board of Education before the United States
Supreme Court—struck a crucial blow in the fight to end Jim Crow,
Ellington’s artistry was evolving in concert with the dissonant times, creating
what the composer called, “music that was new in both its extended forms and
its social significance.”
