AMSGNY Meetings

 The fall meeting will take place at the CUNY Graduate Center, room 3491, on Saturday, September 14.  The program, absracts, and bios follow:

10 AM – 12 Noon  Session 1—American Music

Should We Document the Dark Backwaters of Fame, Celebrity and Fandom?

Artis Wodehouse (Bronx, NY)

 

Failure to Cross Over?  Eva Gauthier and Jazz in the Concert Hall

Madison Spahn (CUNY Graduate Center)

 

What’s in a Name? The Story Behind the Stencil

William E. Hettrick (Hofstra University)

 

“The Grand Symphonic Vision”: Tracing Central Park and its Musical Landscapes, 1858-1874

Elizabeth Frickey (NYU)

 

12 Noon – 12:45 PM—Lunch

 

12:45 PM – 1 PM—Business Meeting 

 

1 PM – 3 PM Session 2—Operatic and Symphonic Music

Was Schoenberg Great?

Wayne Alpern (New York, NY)

 

The “Schatten Leitmotif”:  In/fertility Aesthetics in Strauss Die Frau ohne Schatten

Madison Schundele (CUNY Graduate Center)

 

The Other Program to Florence Price’s Ethiopia’s Shadow in America (1932)

Ruth Ochs (Princeton University)

 

Characterization Through Text-Setting in Mozart’s Entführung

Danielle Bastone Barrettara (Wurlitzer-Bruch Music Antiquarians)

 

 

Should We Document the Dark Backwaters of Fame, Celebrity and Fandom? 

by Artis Wodehouse

The George Gershwin/ Julia Van Norman 1927-1937 correspondence and the 1994 Horace Van Norman/Artis Wodehouse interviews 

Preserved in the Library of Congress in the Gershwin Collection are a series of letters exchanged between George Gershwin (1898-1937) and Julia Van Norman (1905-1996).  The extant letters from both sides were finally reunited at the Library of Congress in roughly 1990.

It is possible that a number of letters were either destroyed or lost, but the fact that so many survived — forty-two from Julia Van Norman to George Gershwin and nine from George Gershwin, to Julia Van Norman — provides testimony to the nature and significance of the relationship.

I became aware of this hitherto unknown correspondence in 1985 when Horace Van Norman — Julia Van Norman’s husband (1905-1995) —  approached me after a performance I had given in Palo Alto, California  In 1994, I conducted an extensive series of taped interviews with him, that —  while centering on his knowledge of the music of the Gershwin era (he was a musician and aspiring composer) —  also touched upon aspects of his situation with his wife and his wife’s relationship with Gershwin. I donated these taped interviews to Yale’s Oral History of American Music.

My paper will give an overview of both the correspondence and the 1994 interviews. It will also summarize information gleaned from these sources that may have value toward widening our understanding of the uniquely lived musical, cultural and social forces surrounding the lives of these three individuals. 

 

Biography

Artis Wodehouse is a pianist, harmoniumist, pianolist and MIDI editor. During the decade 1990-2000 she produced a number of CDs and print publications centering around piano rolls and 78-rpm recordings of Gershwin-era pianists and composers. Several of her interviews are available on academia.edu. Wodehouse’s most widely-distributed CD (issued 1993) is “Gershwin Plays Gershwin” on the Nonesuch label, which to date has sold a half-million copies. During the 1990s and early 2000s she also interviewed a number of people then still alive who had contact with either Gershwin or those in his musical orbit. Wodehouse holds a BM from the Manhattan School of Music, an MM from Yale, and a DMA from Stanford, each degree in piano performance. 

 

                                               Failure to Cross Over? Eva Gauthier and Jazz in the Concert Hall

                                                                                         Madison Spahn

 

In 1923, in a recital at New York’s Aeolian Hall, Canadian mezzo-soprano Eva Gauthier performed for the first time a set of American popular songs by George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern. Throughout the following two years, Gauthier toured with a program entitled “Java to Jazz,” which in addition to popular song featured her typical mélange of opera arias, contemporary art music by composers like Schoenberg and Ravel, and arrangements of traditional Javanese and Malay folk songs, which she had studied during her four years living in Java.

 

Though many composers, including Gershwin, received accolades for “uplifting” and “domesticating” jazz for the concert hall in the 1920s, Gauthier’s experiments with jazz were not universally well received. Many critics mocked her application of classical vocal technique to jazz and ragtime and questioned whether such music, associated with debauchery and mass consumption, belonged in the recital hall. In this paper, I consider this critical dichotomy and argue that three main factors contributed to the relatively unenthusiastic reception of Gauthier’s “Java to Jazz” programs: perceptions of cultural authenticity surrounding jazz performance, Gauthier’s perpetuation of a “highbrow” and intellectualizing stance towards popular music, and standards of propriety that functioned to exclude upper- and middle-class women from the jazz milieu. Exploring the sociocultural circumstances surrounding Gauthier’s performances provides a lens through which to examine the role that jazz played in larger debates about race, gender, and popular culture in the interwar period.

 

Bio:

 Madison Spahn is a doctoral student in historical musicology and women’s and gender studies at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and an Adjunct Lecturer in music at Queens College. Her research focuses on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Franco-American musical relations, particularly through French chanson performance, representations of gender and sexuality through musical performance, and women as musical intellectuals and pedagogues.

 

Ms. Spahn holds an M.M. in Voice Performance from Boston Conservatory and a B.A. in music from Duke University. In addition to her scholarly work, she is an active performer and church musician.

 

What’s in a Name? The Story Behind the Stencil

William E. Hettrick

 

The term “stencil piano” is understood by those who have at least a basic knowledge of the history of the American piano industry as referring to a piano bearing a name other than that of its manufacturer. Most books on this history characterize the phenomenon as a means of deceiving the public and trace this illegitimate activity back to the New York manufacturer Joseph P. Hale, who was accused of the practice by the journalist John Christian Freund in 1875. But Hale was not the originator of this dubious distinction, for I have discovered a similar act of fraudulent dealings in keyboard instruments that took place some twenty years earlier. This paper traces the colorful history of the “stencil menace” from its origins up to the present day, evaluating types of associated activity both negative and positive and identifying  historical figures in the industry (including manufacturers, dealers, trade-journal editors, and politicians) who famously combatted or championed it. A handout includes lists of hundreds of stencil names (undocumented) drawn from two major sources.

 

               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), pp. 349–382; The American Piano Industry: Episodes in the History of a Great Enterprise (Pendragon Press; Edwin Mellen Press, 2020); “Out in Front: The American Cabinet Piano-Player at Home and Abroad,”  Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society, 49 (2023), pp. 5–60; and Johann Herbeck, Selected Sacred Works for Mixed Chorus and Men’s Chorus with Accompanying Instruments (A-R Editions, 2024).

 

      “The Grand Symphonic Vision”: Tracing Central Park and its Musical Landscapes, 1858-1874

                                                                      Elizabeth Frickey

In April of 1858, landscape architects Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux were officially selected as the architects of what would become Central Park. Their plan would provide New Yorkers with 843 acres in which to experience not only an imagined countryside away from the stresses of urban life, but also a variety of recreational and cultural enrichments, including regular concerts performed by a saxhorn band under the direction of bandmaster Harvey B. Dodworth. These free public concerts drew thousands of listeners, especially “the wealthy, the aristocratic, the luxurious, or the lazy” and, according to more florid journalistic depictions, even charmed the “Hamburg swans” with “the notes of the great German composers sailing in the upper air.”

Musical performance has been a key component of Central Park’s identity and function with the New York City landscape since its inception. These early concerts mark only a small portion of the musical performances featured over the years, and yet the extensive exercise of control over the park’s musical output by the early Board of Directors has direct analogies with contemporary policies of the NYC Parks Department. This paper explores the early musical history of Central Park and its relationship to this constructed landscape: a landscape which also displaced hundreds of lower class and racial minority residents when it was constructed. By diving into archival sources, I examine more critically the social goals of Central Park and its musical diversions, as well as the Arendtian publics they were intended to serve. 

 

Bio: Elizabeth Frickey (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in musicology and MacCracken Fellow at New York University. Prior to her studies at NYU, she earned her master's degree in musicology at Indiana University and her bachelor’s degree in Instrumental Music Education from Florida State University. Her current research examines the cultural, ecological, and political impact of community gardens and other urban greenspaces through the lens of music and sound. Elizabeth has presented her work in numerous settings, including meetings of the American Musicological Society, Society for American Music, Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, and the 2023 Music, Research, and Activism conference.

Was Schoenberg Great?

 Abstract

             Was Schoenberg great? We are beyond the stage where his music was just a promise or noble experiment, to one where it must now be weighed on the scales of artistic achievement. What is his legacy, not next to other modernists, but next to Bach and Mozart? Is he ever that original, that exalted, or profound? We might inquire, with Coleridge: what’s the difference between a great mind and a merely strong one?

 Can we ask, as one critic did of Henry James, whether Schoenberg was “merely excessively ingenious?” Is his music too self-conscious, extravagant, and pretentious? To what extent was he motivated by vanity and self-consciousness as a composer? To what degree are his ideas about him rather than music itself? Like Stravinsky, he had the gift of charisma, which makes up for a thousand faults. But are we attracted by his charisma more than his music? 

 Schoenberg may have been haunted more by the idea of the great artist rather than the great work of art. Music was a mode of identity and self-proclamation. Its function was autobiography, to defend and define himself. In some respects, Schoenberg could never get past himself. The force of character was so powerful that even he succumbed to its spell. His music became a manifesto, and that, rather than the music, became his raison d’être. Schoenberg was possessed by what Santayana calls an “intellectual ambition,” not just to hear his music performed, but to make himself revered and historically significant.

 

Wayne Alpern is the recipient a Lifetime Membership Award from the Society for Music Theory in 2010 bestowed “in recognition of truly outstanding contributions to the field of music theory.” He is a graduate of the doctoral program at CUNY Graduate Center and founded and directed the Mannes Institute for the Advancement of Music Theory from 2000–11. Alpern is an independent scholar writing a forthcoming book on Schenkerian Jurisprudence: The Influence of 19th-Century German Legal Theory on 20th-Century Musical Thought to be published by Olms. He was legal counsel for AMS for many years.

 

                    The “Schatten Leitmotif:” In/fertility Aesthetics in Strauss’ Die Frau ohne Schatten

                                                                                  Madison Schindele

Abstract: From mad divas wielding daggers to sopranos coughing blood, performances of disabled women, whether mad or tuberculosis-ridden, pervade the operatic repertoire. While opera scholarship on gender and disability has covered a range of disability topics, the common, gendered narrative of in/fertility has not yet been addressed. Informed by the social model of disability, in/fertility emerges as a construction of deviance; where reproduction functions as central to cultural conceptions of womanhood, in/fertility disables women from fulfilling this gendered expectation. My research addresses this gap by investigating in/fertility representation in Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s opera Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919). This paper will share my theorizing of musical in/fertility aesthetics identified in Die Frau ohne Schatten, specifically investigating Strauss’ “Schatten” leitmotif. The plot of Die Frau ohne Schatten centers on the barren Empress who must venture into the human world to buy a shadow, Hofmannsthal’s metaphor for fertility. Throughout the opera, each time the Empress’ lack of shadow is mentioned, the “Schatten” leitmotif, an arpeggiated, ascending [027] is sung or played across instruments. I argue that the “Schatten” leitmotif emerges as an in/fertility aesthetic, characterized by indeterminacy, a detachment from tonic contextualization, directional stasis, and repetition without closure. While my larger dissertation project includes a close reading of Hofmannsthal’s libretto, contextualizing the in/fertility narrative within the social context of reproduction in interwar Vienna, this paper argues that through the score of Die Frau ohne Schatten itself, in/fertility is employed as a musical aesthetic through the “Schatten” leitmotif.

Bio: Madison Schindele (she/her) is a PhD candidate in musicology at the Graduate Center and adjunct lecturer at Queens College. Her research centers on disability in opera, specifically, representations of infertility in German operas of the early 20th century. 

 

                     The Other Program to Florence Price’s Ethiopia’s Shadow in America (1932)

                                                                       Ruth Ochs

 

Florence Price’s Ethiopia’s Shadow in America is one of the composer’s boldest symphonic statements. It fully displays her artistic mission to explore reconciling African-American history and musical idioms into the rarefied and elitist realm of orchestral concert repertory. To help audiences understand Ethiopia’s Shadow in America, Price wrote a short narrative program to explain the music’s three-part journey. The program is published with the full score and often accompanies concert programs. 

 

This presentation will examine the degree to which Price’s words reflect the message suggested in the music. In particular, the music of the opening and close of Ethiopia’s Shadow in America will be considered for what imagery it vividly suggests beyond Price’s program. About the closing section, she shared a description of the African-American “adaptation” and the “fusion of his native and acquired impulses.” The “fusion” suggested in the music, however, is in no way one of hopeful reconciliation or uncomplicated equilibrium: her orchestration and musical figures depict discomfort and vivid harshness. Requiring performers and audiences to take Price at her sincerest in her music, the music’s disharmony with Price’s verbal program allows us to decode the nuanced precarity of her moment in musical history. She compels us to hear for ourselves that progress had not yet been achieved. Through a nuanced understanding of score and sound, Price’s Ethiopia’s Shadow in America acknowledges a vivid racial and cultural imbalance in twentieth-century America.

 

Bio: 

Dr. Ruth Ochs is a conductor, scholar, and educator based in central New Jersey. She is the conductor of the Princeton University Sinfonia, a co-curricular campus orchestra. The ensemble performs a wide variety of repertory, including regularly presenting new works by Princeton University undergraduate composers. Passionate about nourishing and inspiring musicians of all ages and aspirations, Dr. Ochs shares her time with community initiatives and is in her twentieth season as conductor of the Westminster Community Orchestra. As a scholar, she has focused on women composers and Polish music, and has published previously unpublished songs of Fanny (Mendelssohn) Hensel. She holds degrees in music, orchestral conducting, and music history, from Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Princeton University, respectively. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Princeton University’s Department of Music.

                                    Characterization Through Text-Setting in Mozart’s Entführung

                                                             Danielle Bastone Barrettara

On the subject of Mozart’s German-language text-setting, there are several studies that inventory the recurring rhythmic patterns with which Mozart set the various poetic meters of his Singspiel libretti (Lippmann 1978, Webster 1991, Schmid 2003). Although these surveys reveal much about the ways Mozart both observed and eschewed the text-setting conventions of his day, they do not consider the possible dramaturgic motivations behind his choices on any broad scale—that is, across a complete opera or character portrayal—and tend to favor Die Zauberflöte above his first Singspiel triumph, Die Entführung aus dem Serail.

This paper will identify and analyze two rhythmic patterns that Mozart reserves for specific dramaturgic purposes throughout the text-setting of the Entführung. The first is a syncopated setting, often paired with a rising melodic contour, that accompanies the heroine Konstanze’s many expressions of grief. This expressive association is so firmly established by Act II that Mozart can thereafter deploy the pattern in the orchestral accompaniment to wordlessly evoke her pain. The second is a downbeat-oriented pattern that, being sung exclusively by Turkish characters, becomes a distinguishing element of Turkish characterization that goes beyond the caricatured gestures of the alla turca idiom. Drawing from research on the compositional order of the opera (Melamed 2003), I will further suggest that this latter pattern may have informed the principal rhythmic motives of the “Turkish” overture. Together, these analyses will offer a new perspective on the Entführung, the dramaturgic subtleties of which are frequently undervalued amongst Mozart’s mature operas.

Danielle Bastone Barrettara is Head of Research at Wurlitzer-Bruck Music Antiquarians and holds a Ph.D. from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is also an editor at the Music in Gotham project. Her work focuses on rhythm, text-setting, and meter in Mozart’s Singspiels. Danielle’s most recent article, on phrase structures in the Entführung, was published in Theory and Practice this spring, and her forthcoming study of text-setting in Mozart’s Zaide will appear in the same journal next year.