Fall Meeting--September 30, 2023
0 Comments Published by AMSGNY President on Tuesday, September 5, 2023 at 1:20 PM.
The Fall 2023 meeting of the AMSGNY will take place on
Saturday, September 30th. It
will take place at Wagner College on Staten Island. Travel directions may be found here: https://wagner.edu/about/visit/ We will be meeting in Campus Hall, which is
#1 on the campus map: https://wagner.edu/about/visit/campus-map/
The schedule follows.
The presentations are arranged so that the subject matter is chronological.
11AM-12 Noon Session 1
Schulz, Kirnberger, and J. S. Bach’s Bm Fugue: A
reassessment of BWV 869 as found in Die wahren Grundsätze zum Gebrauch der Harmonie.
Miguel Campinho (Wagner College)
Reevaluating
Lakme
Jeff S.
Dailey (AMSGNY)
12-12:15 Break
12:15-1:15 Session 2
Specters of Mahler:
Media, Mediums, and the Transmission of Schoenberg to the United States Benjamin
P. Skoronski (Cornell University)
Between
Human and Machine in Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de maese Pedro
Sylvia
Kahan (CUNY Graduate Center and College
of Staten Island)
1:15-1:45 Lunch
1:45- 2 Commemoration of Dr. Isabelle Cazeaux, including selections from Durufle's Requiem, performed by the Wagner College Choir
2-3 PM Session
3
The Self-Effacing Film Scorer No More: Three
Examples of Film Composers' Interactions with a Larger Public
Jonathan
Waxman (NYU and Hofstra University)
Musicology in the 2020 Ninth Circuit en banc Led
Zeppelin Decision
Lawrence Ferrara (New York University)
ABSTRACTS AND BIOS
Schulz, Kirnberger, and J. S. Bach’s Bm
Fugue: A reassessment of BWV 869 as found in Die wahren Grundsätze zum Gebrauch der Harmonie.
Miguel Campinho (Wagner College)
Johann Abraham Peter Schulz (1747-1800)
published, in 1773, what amounts to one of the earliest harmonic analysis of a
musical composition, and the object was the last fugue of Johann Sebastian
Bach’s Das
Wohltemperierte Klavier, Teil I: BVW 869 in B minor. This was however published
under the name of his mentor, Johann Philipp Kirnberger (1721-83), and meant as
a synthesis of the latter’s thoughts on harmony as expounded in his then recent Die Kunst des
reinen Satzes in der Musik. Kirnberger did at one point study under J. S.
Bach, and Schulz’s work carries at least the responsibility inherent to such an
association.
In
his dissertation on Kirnberger, David Beach points out Schulz’s
‘misinterpretations’ of Bach’s fugue. Joel Lester, in his survey of
eighteenth-century music theory, also presents this analysis pointing to the
limitations of Kirnberger’s approach.
Looking
into Bach’s writings on thoroughbass, and studying carefully Schulz’s analysis
both in light of current scholarship on Bach’s teaching methods—and
also current research on broader teaching approaches in the eighteenth century,
such as partimenti—I present Schulz’s work in a different light, showing him
more in accord with Bach and eighteenth-century harmonic thought than his critics
give him credit for.
Bio:
Miguel
Campinho teaches Music Theory at Wagner College. He has published the
chronological catalogue of solo piano works by Portuguese composer-pianist
Óscar da Silva (1870–1958). He has also published the first critical editions
of Óscar da Silva's Fantasia for solo piano and the Sonata Saudade for violin and piano. He has presented about Óscar da
Silva's music at the American Liszt Society Festival and at the European Piano
Teachers Association Conference. As a pianist, Campinho has recorded the
complete sonatas and sonatinas of Portuguese composer-pianist Eurico Tomás de
Lima (1908–1989), available on all major streaming platforms. Miguel Campinho
holds a DMA in piano performance from The Hartt School (University of Hartford).
He previously taught at the Butler School of Music, University of Texas at
Austin.
Reevaluating
Lakme
Jeff S.
Dailey (AMSGNY)
One of the most famous French operas
of the 19th century, Lakme remains the best known vocal work by Leo
Delibes. Once frequently performed, it is not heard as often as it used
to. In the 21st century, it is time to reevaluate this work in the light
of current theories and also to examine its impact on popular culture
worldwide, which includes film, television, video games, and cosmetics.
By analyzing the score and the libretto, it is possible to place the opera on
the continuum of artistic creation that started with the first exposure of the
Indian subcontinent to Europeans. As with many other 19th century operas,
Lakme's score contains much for contemporary audiences to admire.
Bio:
Jeff S.
Dailey is the President of the Greater New York Chapter of the American
Musicological Society. Now retired from a decades-long career in
administration, he devotes his time to musical and theatrical projects he did
not have time for when he was working. He has recently given several
lectures on Himalayan organology at the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art
on Staten Island. His research on Lakme
was conducted so that he could prepare an introduction to the reprinted edition
of the original orchestral score, which should be available later this
year. As the founder and artistic director of the musical ensemble
Collectio Musicorum, he has prepared their upcoming performances of music from
Shakespeare's First Folio, in commemoration of the book's 400th anniversary,
and recordings of music by the 19th Italian composer/conductor Giacomo Panizza,
which should be available in 2024.
A proud
graduate of Wagner College, he has, since the beginning of this year, overseen
the creation of an online archive of music by the Wagner College Collegium
Musicum and its director, Dr. Ronald Cross. Over 100 hours of recorded
music are now available on the website https://collegiummusicumwagneriensis.com/.
Dr.
Dailey retired as Director of Fine and Performing Arts in the Deer Park School
District in Suffolk County. Under his
direction, the district was routinely named as One of the Best Communities for
Music Education in the United States by the NAMM Foundation. He also founded the Long Island Student
Shakespeare Festival, where, over the six years of the festival’s existence,
over 1000 students had the opportunity to learn about and perform
Shakespeare. He also taught at St. John’s
University on Staten Island (five years), The College of Staten Island (four
years) and Five Towns College (seventeen years). His published work includes studies of
Gilbert and Sullivan, Kurt Weill, Gaetano Donizetti, John Donne, Beowulf,
and Eugene O’Neill. He earned his Ph.D.
at New York University, and his dissertation, on Sullivan’s Ivanhoe, was
awarded the prize for Best Dissertation in Opera by the National Opera Association. Since retiring, Dr. Dailey has put his two
seminary degrees to use by serving as pastor at All Nations Lutheran Church in
Manhattan and Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in New Rochelle.
Specters of Mahler:
Media, Mediums, and the Transmission of Schoenberg to the United States Benjamin
P. Skoronski (Cornell University)
Mahler
was dead, to begin with. His ghost haunts a 1911 song recital in which American
soprano Alma Gluck sings two of his Rückert-Lieder followed by the U.S.
premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s “Waldsonne.” This recital provides an avenue
for reflection upon the mediatic nature of musical transmission. Scholarly
narratives of the transmission of music are primarily concerned with the
question of influence, erasing the agents that initiate musical migration. In
this article I consider the mediatic agencies at work in the transmission of
Schoenberg to the U.S. I call into question the anthropocentric division between
the human and media, suggesting that human agents are no less mediatic than their
technological cousins. I consider these questions through Alma Gluck’s 1911
U.S.
premiere of
Schoenberg’s “Waldsonne,” arguing that Mahler transmitted the work of Schoenberg
to Gluck, functioning as a mediatic agency that remains agential after death.
Mahler
takes on the valiance of Sybille Krämer’s messenger, the mediatic agent that
transmits a
message from sender to receiver while dying in the process (Krämer 2015). Gluck premieres “Waldsonne” at a recital
memorializing the late Mahler, also singing two of his own Rückert-Lieder that
address death and transcendent bliss from a first-person perspective. As such
Gluck serves as Jeffrey Sconce’s spiritualist medium, through whom the ghostly
Mahler speaks of his death and afterlife in a public séance (Sconce 2000). This
spiritualist metaphor extends to Gluck’s premiere of “Waldsonne” as well, as
Mahler continues to act as a transmitter of Schoenberg’s music from beyond the
grave. By
employing
Krämer’s and Sconce’s anthropomorphic models of media I demonstrate how to conceive
of human agents as mediators within a flat ontology. I suggest that the transmission
of music always takes place within a web of mediatic agencies and events—material
and immaterial, human and nonhuman, living and dead.
Bio:
Benjamin P. Skoronski (he/him)
is a Ph.D. student of Music and Sound Studies (formerly known as
“Musicology”) at Cornell University. His interests include 20th-century
modernisms, deadness, the avant-garde, spiritualism, and theorizing the
archive. Skoronski is also interested in overarching questions addressing the
position of musicology as a discipline within academic discourse and the
contemporary world: the crisis of the humanities, the deconstruction of
the concept of "music," and the future of music studies. Prior to
beginning his doctoral studies at Cornell, Skoronski taught as a lecturer at
the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music.
Between
Human and Machine in Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de maese Pedro
Sylvia
Kahan (CUNY Graduate Center and College
of Staten Island)
June 25, 2023
marked the centenary of the first performance of Manuel de Falla’s El
retablo de maese Pedro in the Paris music salon of the Princesse Edmond de
Polignac, who commissioned the work and to whom it is dedicated. Based on
episodes from Cervantes’s Don Quixote, El retablo is scored for
three voices, chamber orchestra and harpsichord and is “acted” by both
life-sized marionettes and hand puppets. It enjoyed an immediate success:
within a few years of its premiere, it was performed all over Europe, both in
its original form and in redesigned productions.
Of the work, the
composer wrote to the Princesse, “It represents, perhaps, among my
compositions, the one to which I have given my greatest sense of fantasy” [celui
où j’ai mis plus d’illusion]. The complex production details of this
elaborate play-within-a-play include having the dramatic action enacted
entirely by marionettes and hand puppets and situating the work’s three singers
offstage among the members of the chamber orchestra. These innovative creative
choices have been discussed elsewhere (see, for example, Juan Miermont-Beaure,
2003). Likewise, the composer’s decision to adopt the austere and refined style
of Castilian music in order to evoke the time and place of Cervantes’
masterwork, has been amply discussed in the scholarly literature (see, for
example, Michael Christoforides, 2002; Carol A. Hess, 2001 and 2005).
My aim to shed
light on a little-examined aspect of El retablo: the compositional
decisions that Falla made in his scoring to accommodate both the movements of
the life-sized marionettes and the hand puppets. I will discuss the ways the
percussion and harpsichord evoke mechanization in the music and the inclusion
of many unmetered, recitativo-like passages that enable flexibility in
the timing of the marionettes’ movements. The “disembodied” voices of the vocal
soloists, hidden among the instrumentalists, and the extravagantly virtuosic
nature of the instrumental solos creates a fascinating tension with the angular
movements of the non-human “actors”. My analyses of the musical settings for
the puppets and marionettes will video excerpts of productions of El retablo,
including a 2002 New York performance by puppeteer Basil Twist and the Eos
Orchestra.
Bio:
Sylvia Kahan is Professor of Music at The Graduate Center and College of
Staten Island, City University of New York, where she is a member of both the
Piano and Musicology faculties. She has performed as concerto
soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician in concert venues and festivals
throughout North America and Europe. She has participated in the Tanglewood, Aspen, Waterloo, Delta, and
Nancy festivals. As a collaborative pianist, she has partnered
world-renowned vocal artists including Dame Felicity Lott, François Le Roux,
the late Roberta Peters and Shirley Verrett, and members of the New York
Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and the Emerson and Ysaÿe
String Quartets.
As a musicologist, Sylvia Kahan specializes
in 19th- and 20th-century French music and culture. Her publications include
studies of Nadia Boulanger and the Polignac family, press coverage of chamber
performances in the nineteenth century, Debussy reception in America, Fauré’s
French and British patrons, Prokofiev in Paris, Varèse in New York, newspaper
coverage of the Paris World’s Fairs, women as patrons of music and art, and the
history of octatonicism. She is the author of Music’s Modern Muse and In
Search of New Scales, both published by University of Rochester
Press). Her 2018 Winnaretta
Singer Polignac: Princesse, mécène et musicienne (Les presses
du réel, Dijon) was the inaugural First-Prize winner of Parité Assurance’s Prix
Littéraire and was a runner-up for the Prix France Musique des Muses. She is
currently working on a book on Marie-Blanche de Polignac. Sylvia Kahan is past
president of the American Musicological Society-Greater New York Chapter.
The Self-Effacing Film Scorer No More: Three
Examples of Film Composers' Interactions with a Larger Public
Jonathan
Waxman (NYU and Hofstra University)
As film scoring has become a
more prominent compositional art, film composers have been promoted in a
variety of ways beyond just composing for films from creating suites of their
music, giving commentaries on their scores for physical media and on-line, and
even receiving acknowledgment in the films themselves.
This paper will explore, with
representative examples, three different ways that film composers have been
credited beyond the scores they composed. The first example is Leonard
Bernstein creating an orchestral suite for his only film score On the
Waterfront (1954.) While other composers such as Steiner and Korngold have
created suites of their music, Bernstein was able to bring his suite to a
broader public through his platform as a conductor and educator. The second
example is composer commentaries which started with DVD audio tracks in the
late 1990s and have in recent years experienced a resurgence in the on-line
medium, allowing viewers to now see the composers analyze their music through
videos. The last example is composers recently being credited in the films
themselves with a notable recent case being John Williams’s small role as
"Oma Tres" in Rise of Skywalker (2019,) but also Tim Simonec being
credited as the composer of his piece “Upswingin’” in the film Whiplash (2014.)
Simonec became the first film composer mentioned specifically by name in a film
alongside his composition. All three of these examples show over the decades an
increasing public face to film scorers and their respective film compositions.
Bio:
Jonathan Waxman completed a
Ph.D. in historical musicology at New York University (GSAS) and a Bachelors of
Music in Piano Performance from New York University (Steinhardt.) He is
currently on the faculty at Hofstra University and NYU (Steinhardt) where he
teaches classes in music history and music theory as well as graduate seminars
in research methods and American music. He has recently published an article in
the collection _Nostalgia and Video Game Music_ on 8-bit chiptune adaptations
of film music scores and serves as Vice-President of the Greater New York
chapter of the American Musicological Society.
Musicology in the 2020 Ninth Circuit en banc Led
Zeppelin Decision
Lawrence Ferrara (New York University)
The
72-page, 11-judges 2020 Ninth Circuit en banc decision in the Led Zeppelin Stairway
to Heaven litigation upheld the result of the 2016 jury trial -- which
found that Stairway did not infringe the copyright of Plaintiff’s
song Taurus -- and has already had a significant impact on analysis of musicological
elements in copyright litigations by (1) establishing that musical works that
were registered with the U. S. Copyright Office before the implementation of
the 1976 Copyright Act are governed by the 1909 Copyright Act and thereby, the
sheet music deposit copy “defines the four corners” of the musical work, (2)
abrogating the “inverse ratio rule” which allowed courts to impose a lower
standard for infringement when a high degree of access existed, and (3)
qualifying the “selection and arrangement” of elements by finding Plaintiff
merely identified a “combination” of elements without explaining how those
elements are “particularly selected and arranged” which “amounts to nothing
more than trying to copyright commonplace elements.”
Each
of these findings will be explained using the piano, and audio clips and visual
exhibits that were used at trial.
Immediately
following the March 2020 en banc decision in Led Zeppellin and citing
that decision, (1) the judge in the Katy Perry “Dark Horse” trial [Gray v
Perry] dismissed the case, (2) the judge in Johannsongs vs. Lovland (regarding
Lovland’s “You Raise Me Up”) dismissed the case, (3) the judge in Smith vs.
The Weeknd dismissed the case, and (4) in the recent Ed Sheeran trial in Griffin
vs. Sheeran, Judge Stanton delimited Plaintiff’s 1973 song to the sheet
music deposit copy. Lawrence Ferrara was
the testifying musicologist for defendants in all four of these subsequent
cases as well as in Led Zeppelin.
Bio:
Lawrence
Ferrara is an author and a co-author of books as well as articles in
peer-reviewed journals on music theory and analysis, keyboard harmony and
improvisation, philosophy of music, research methodologies, and other areas
related to music. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book, Philosophy and the Analysis of Music: Bridges to Musical Sound,
Form and Reference.
At NYU, Dr. Ferrara has taught undergraduate and
graduate classes in music theory and analysis, music history, research methods
in music, keyboard harmony and improvisation, philosophy of music and the arts,
music performance practices, and music copyright. Dr. Ferrara was the Director
of Music Performance Programs, and from 1986-1995, Director of Doctoral (Ph.D.)
Studies in the Department of Music and Performing Arts. From 1995-2011, he was
Chair of the Department, in 2006 he was named Director of Steinhardt Music and
Performing Arts, and in 2011, he was named Director Emeritus, his ongoing
title. Dr. Ferrara is on the full-time faculty in music theory and music
history at NYU/Steinhardt.
Dr. Ferrara is currently a member of the Editorial
Board of the journal Music and
Moving Image (University of Illinois Press) and on the board
of Editorial Consultants for the journal Philosophy of
Music Education Review (Indiana University Press). Previously,
he was Associate Editor of the Journal of
Qualitative Evaluation in the Arts, and a member of the editorial
board for the New York University Education
Quarterly. He was a co-P.I. on federal and foundation grants for
research in performing arts medicine and Vice President and co-founder of a
non-profit federation of physicians and artists fostering research that bridges
the arts to medicine. Dr. Ferrara was a winner of a Presidential Fellowship and
the Daniel E. Griffiths Award for research, the latter regarding his writing
and research on Schopenhauer's philosophy of music (Cambridge University Press).
Dr. Ferrara is an active music
copyright consultant for record, music publishing and motion picture companies,
and individuals in the United States and abroad. He has given invited lectures on music
copyright litigations at Harvard University Law School in each of the last
thirteen years, at Columbia University Law School over a period of fifteen
years, at other law schools, and for companies (such as Netflix) and
organizations (such as The Los Angeles Copyright Society), and panel presentations for
numerous organizations (such as The Copyright Society of the United States).
Dr. Ferrara has also given several peer-reviewed presentations regarding music
copyright at meetings of the American Musicological Society GNY.
As
a music copyright consultant, Dr. Ferrara has provided musical analyses on
behalf of artists and/or composers in the United States, Canada, Europe,
Scandinavia, and Australia.
