AMSGNY Meetings

ABSTRACTS AND BIOS

“It Takes Two”: Analyzing and Contextualizing Stephen Sondheim’s Concertino for Two Pianos 

Poe M. Allphin (CUNY Graduate Center)

         In a New York Times article titled “Why You’ll Probably Never Hear A Sondheim Concerto,” Anthony Tommasini asked Stephen Sondheim why he “[had] never composed an instrumental piece,” to which he replied that he did so in college with a piano sonata and a violin sonata. Shortly after graduating from Williams College, and just before studying theory and composition with Milton Babbitt, Sondheim also wrote a double piano concertino. Tommasini’s 2016 framing implies that Sondheim left the promise of a career in serious instrumental music to pursue a more frivolous career in musical theatre –– a suggestion that simultaneously minimizes the impact of Sondheim on Broadway by positioning classical music as superior while also neglecting to imagine the ways in which Sondheim’s classical training and musical theatre training were intertwined and the effects that these each have had on his later music. Sondheim’s 1950 Concertino for Two Pianos provides an interesting framework for examining his early influences and his studies through the end of his time at Williams as well as a stepping stone from which to trace these early roots and his work with Milton Babbitt forward through the many decades of his career that followed.

Poe M. Allphin is a musicology PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center and an adjunct instructor at Queens College. His research focuses on queer musical communities in the U.S. from the 70s-90s. He works at the intersection of queer/trans studies, disability studies, and music, using archives and conducting oral histories. His academic and creative work has been published in places including Transgender Studies Quarterly and the Anthology of New Music: Trans & Nonbinary Voices.

Sentential Ritornello Models and their Application to the First Movement 

of J.S. Bach’s Concerto for Two Harpsichords in C major (BWV 1061) 

Vlad Praskurnin Poe M. Allphin (CUNY Graduate Center)

      Laurence Dreyfus (1996) and Juan Mesa (2021) have fruitfully applied sentential models to the opening ritornellos of J.S. Bach’s allegro concerto movements, using the first movement of J.S. Bach’s Concerto for Two Harpsichords in C major (BWV 1061) as an exemplar. For the music following this movement’s opening ritornello, however, Dreyfus’s and Mesa’s atemporal focuses on the subsequent presentation and development of ritornello material minimize the joint contribution of ritornello and non-ritornello material to the movement’s form.  

      By considering the formal function of both ritornello and non-ritornello material, I argue that the sentential organization of the opening ritornello section identified by Dreyfus and Mesa is reproduced in each of this movement’s subsequent sections. Building on Joel Lester’s (2001) observations that Bach’s large-scale movements are often comprised of a succession of parallel sections, and further that in ritornello forms, such parallel sections are inclusive of both ritornello and non-ritornello material, I show that the movement consists of six parallel sections, each of which is described by Mesa’s opening ritornello TESC model (Tonic definition, Elaboration, Structural return preparation and Cadence). I propose that Mesa’s T stage can itself support a nested TESC model, and that his C stage can incorporate one or more optional pre-cadential complexes, passages which prolong tonic, subdominant and/or dominant harmonies before a nested C stage fulfilled by Mesa’s cadential complex.  

      The proposed understanding of Bach’s ritornello form complements previous analytical perspectives by situating the local formal functions of both ritornello and non-ritornello material within a section-level sentential framework. 

Vlad Praskurnin is a Ph.D. student in Music Theory at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests span the 16th to 18th centuries, and include schema theory, form, historical pedagogy and improvisation, among others. He has presented his research at the joint AMS/SMT 2023 conference, the 2022 Galant Schema Studies conference, and conferences organized by the Citations: Renaissance Imitation Mass (CRIM) Project. Involvement in the CRIM Project resulted in a Master’s Thesis, supported by a SSHRC Canadian Graduate Scholarship, on Orlando di Lasso’s Chanson-Masses. He earned M.A. and B.Mus. degrees in Music Theory at McGill University. 

Four Young Men of Vienna Celebrate Divine Fulfillment of a Vow

William E Hettrick (Hofstra University)

Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I (born 1830) was attacked by a knife-wielding assailant on February 18, 1853, but he survived with only a minor wound. In thanks to God for his deliverance, his younger brother, Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian (born 1832) vowed to erect a church in Vienna. It was to be known as the Votivkirche. Heinrich Ferstel (born 1828) won the architectural competition with his neo-gothic design. April 24, 1856, was chosen as the date of the ceremonial Grundsteinlegung (laying of the foundation-stone) in an area just outside the north-west section of the old city wall. The Wiener Männergesang-Verein (founded in 1843) was invited to perform at the ceremony, where the organization’s newly elected conductor, Johann Herbeck (born 1831), would be making his public debut. Herbeck followed the custom of writing his own music for the occasion, creating two works for men’s chorus and military brass band, an ensemble suitable for outdoor performance. He worked at great speed, composing, copying parts, and rehearsing his musical forces in only a few days. Herbeck’s pieces are settings of sacred texts selected from Psalms 26 and 27 (Catholic numbering) and the Te Deum. He and his performers received an appreciative response from the Archduke after the ceremony. The Votivkirche was finally completed in 1879. Sadly, two of the four young men of Vienna did not live to witness the event.   

William E. Hettrick is Professor Emeritus of Hofstra University. His research on Johann Herbeck (1831–1877) has produced five major volumes of critical editions of choral music (A-R Editions) and the article “Johann Herbeck’s Edition of Choral Works by Franz Schubert: History and Analysis” (Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 2019). He is also the author of \The ‘Musica instrumentalis deudsch’ of Martin Agricola: A Treatise on Musical Instruments, 1529 and 1545 (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and his recent The American Piano Industry: Episodes in the History of a Great Enterprise (Pendragon Press; Edwin Mellen Press).  

Sixteenth-Century Instrumentalists as Artisans and Intellectuals

Lynette Bowring (Yale University)

In the recent flourishing of research on artisans during the early modern period, the production of lasting material products and the presence of formal guild structures have featured strongly. The ephemeral output and less regulated workers of the performative arts have proved more challenging to incorporate into a framework of artisanal production, and subfields such as music have not been integrated into broader research on artisanal cultures. In this paper, I reconsider the potential connections between musical practices and research on more traditional artisanal occupations, drawing particularly upon examples from Italian instrumentalists of the early to mid-sixteenth century. The childhood music education of Benvenuto Cellini and the activities and self-positioning of the civic instrumentalists of Brescia demonstrate many commonalities with artisanal cultures, yet they also reveal elements of intellectual and artistic aspiration. Given that music during this period could be variously viewed on a continuum that stretched from the heavenly spheres all the way down to the most disadvantaged street musician, I argue that the close yet slightly uncomfortable alignment with traditional artisanal practices speaks to the challenges inherent in classifying artistic activities and outputs, as well as to gradual transformations in status that instrumentalists were encountering during this period.

Lynette Bowring is Assistant Professor of Music History at the Yale School of Music; she previously taught at the Juilliard School, Rutgers University, and Westminster Choir College. She earned her PhD in musicology from Rutgers University in 2017. Her research interests focus around literacy and education for musicians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; she is currently working toward a book proposal on the topic. She has coedited an essay collection with Rebecca Cypess and Liza Malamut, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy, and is awaiting the publication of an edition of motets by Marianna Martines. 

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.

Benjamin P. Skoronski (he/him) is a second-year Ph.D. student of Music and Sound Studies at Cornell University. His research interests include 20th-century modernisms, media theory, organology, and music historiography. He has presented his work at numerous conferences, ranging from regional (various AMS chapter meetings) to national (SAM 2022) to international (IMS 2022). Prior to beginning his doctoral studies at Cornell, Skoronski taught as a lecturer at the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music.

The Case of the Missing High D, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Failure

Danielle Buonaiuto (CUNY Graduate Center)

The soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson, a frequent and feted interpreter of contemporary music from 1965-2005, made the premiere recording of Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol with Pierre Boulez and the Cleveland Orchestra in 1990. In a recent interview, Phyllis explained to me why her final climactic high D in the Nightingale’s “Chanson” doesn’t sound: at the time, Howard Hartog, the beloved manager that she and Boulez had shared for many years, was dying. In this presentation, I explore through an autoethnographic and performance-based narrative what a feminist, compassionate analysis might bring to the question of the “missing” high D. Re-evaluating assumptions of what constitutes a “successful performance,” I ask what else might be revealed about the function of social relationships in musicking, by an analysis of this performance and its moment of vocal failure. I confront the attendant issues that come to light: hegemonic forms of knowledge, and the gendered dimensions thereof; the importance of performance and performance analysis to a fulsome understanding of contemporary vocal music and its makers; and the affective dimension of collaboration. Using Sedgwick’s theory of paranoid vs reparative reading, Will Cheng’s ideas about “justness” in musical spaces, and a corpus of musicological work resting on embodied forms of analysis, I contextualize my extensive archival research on Phyllis Bryn-Julson and her contemporaries, including a series of interviews. Considering affection as a dimension of professional relationships in the mid-century avant-garde reveals an urgency to foreground the humanity of musical actors, living and dead, in the moment of collaboration, as well as in our historicizations, attending to our intimate histories as carefully as our canonical.

Danielle Buonaiuto (she/they/any) is a PhD student in Musicology at CUNY, The Graduate Center, and a professional opera singer. She maintains an active solo career, and is particularly sought after for world premieres; her most recent projects were Pomegranate (Canadian Opera Company) and RUR: A Torrent of Light (Tapestry Opera), both in her hometown of Toronto. She also sings in the Extra Chorus of the Metropolitan Opera and the Berwick Chorus of the Oregon Bach Festival. Danielle’s scholarly work is deeply informed by her experiences in the field; she is interested leveraging queer theory, feminist frameworks, and field and archival research to critique systems of inequity on stages and in boardrooms of opera and vocal music. She is currently undertaking an extensive archival project to assist Phyllis Bryn-Julson in completing her memoir, which will be an important contribution to current perspectives on the American and European avant-garde from 1970-2000.

The Water King: An Earlier English Erlkönig

Lindsay Campbell Poe M. Allphin (CUNY Graduate Center)

Personifying a story’s imagery through the piano in nineteenth century art song has fascinated musicologists and theorists alike, with scholars like Susan Youens and Christopher Gibbs highlighting such techniques within Franz Schubert’s Lieder. As the field of musicology continues to expand its knowledge of women composers and their musical output, it is imperative to place women’s achievements within the narrative of art song scholarship. Focusing on the development of symbolic keyboarding techniques, my research highlights women’s compositional accomplishments in art song. My paper examines one work of composer Harriet Wainewright, “The Water King,” a ballad for five voices. Using the framework Richard Leppert provides in The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body, I will discuss Wainewright’s racial and political positionality as an English woman living in Kolkata, India and her collection of songs written during her time there, with particular attention paid to the final work of the collection. I juxtapose the compositional techniques used by Wainewright in her 1811 setting of “The Water King” with those used in Franz Schubert’s 1815 “Erlkönig” in order to challenge the historical narrative surrounding the role of the piano in art song. By exploring the composer Harriet Wainewright, I argue that the compositional techniques, especially the keyboard’s function, used in her ballad, “The Water King,” parallel and predate those popularized by Schubert in “Erlkönig” four years later. In conclusion, this project sheds light on women’s historically neglected achievements in the compositional evolution of the art song genre by closely examining Wainewright’s “The Water King.”

Lindsay Campbell is a PhD student in Musicology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.  Her scholarly interests include German and English art song, women composers, and gender studies.  Originally from Michigan, she holds bachelors’ degrees in Music Education and Vocal Performance, and a master’s degree in Choral Conducting from Michigan State University.  Prior to her time at CUNY, Lindsay taught middle school and high school choir for six years in Michigan public schools. 

Why Transcribe Mahler’s Welte-Mignon Piano Rolls?

Artis Wodehouse

In 1905 Mahler recorded four piano renditions of selections from his orchestral/vocal music on piano roll for the Welte-Mignon. They are particularly valuable since the Welte-Mignon method for performance capture — and lack of invasive post-production editing —  can be trusted to give some representation of Mahler’s actual performance. Wodehouse is currently collaborating with Dr. Peter Phillips, researcher/expert in the conversion of Welte piano roll data to the digital domain, and Bill Ooms, transcriber of Mahler’s Welte-Mignon MIDI data as formulated by Dr. Phillips. The presentation will give an overview of their work to date as well as Wodehouse’s goal of creating a print edition encompassing both a readable score and extensive commentary on Mahler’s deeply embedded late 19th C. performance practice. The presentation will touch on the core issues of transcription of Mahler’s live performance captured on roll — what a score can or should depict, and the relationship between Mahler’s roll performance to his published scores of same.  A sound recording and two print scores of the Mahler rolls will be used for the presentation. Wodehouse will illustrate some salient aspects of Mahler’s performance practice on the piano available at the meeting site.

Pianist, harmoniumist, pianolist and  MIDI editor 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. Her best-seller, “Gershwin Plays Gershwin”, on the Nonesuch label has sold over 500,000 copies. Beginning in 2000, Wodehouse began performing on a representative group of antique reed organs, harmoniums and antique pianos that she had restored and brought to concert condition. Her recording "Arthur Bird Music for the American Harmonium" was released in 2016 on the Raven label. Wodehouse has a BM from the Manhattan School of Music, an MM from Yale, and a DMA from Stanford.