AMSGNY Meetings

The Hidden Hero and Double Trope: Leitmotivic Development and Narrative Meaning in Final Fantasy Tactics (1997) Richard J. Anatone  {Prince George's Community College}

              Final Fantasy Tactics is widely celebrated for both its compelling story and leitmotivic soundtrack. Its most curious leitmotif is “Hero’s Theme”: doing little to instill optimism, it is instead presented as a lament in the singing style, reflecting the tragic nature of protagonist Ramza Beoulve (Day-O'Connell 2014). And yet, despite its mournful lyricism and lack of marches and fanfares, Ramza’s theme is successfully appropriated into other themes, many of which occupy the victorious and tragic realms of the heroic mode (Hatten 2014). The question arises: how can a theme that lacks such overt references to militarism be so easily transplanted into the heroic style? There seems to be something hidden within Ramza’s theme that suggests the heroic.

Using Ramza’s theme as a case study, I identify a new hidden hero topic: one that acts as a trope on the entire heroic topical field itself. I demonstrate ways in which this topic affords composers unique opportunities for narrative foreshadowing and commentary through what I call the double trope. By stripping the theme to its prototypical form, I reveal its hidden heroic nature through its intrinsic musical attributes associated with militarism (Bribitzer-Stull 2015, Monelle 2004). I then address several of its transformations and developmental variations as different tropes on the heroic style through their interaction with the prototype’s heroic identity. I conclude by addressing the double trope in its transformation “Memories,” which reveals layers of hidden narrative meaning regarding Ramza’s relationship with his childhood friend, their shared past, and their ill-fated quests that arise from their divergent military pursuits.

Richard Anatone currently serves as Professor of Music Theory and Coordinator of Applied Music at Prince George's Community College in Largo, MD. His research interests primarily surround leitmotivic design in narrative media. He has been published in Music Theory Spectrum, Music and the Moving Image, and the Journal of Sound and Music in Games. His edited collection The Music of Nobuo Uematsu in the Final Fantasy Series was published in 2022 by Intellect Publishing, and his co-edited collection Music and Remedated Storytelling: The Convergence and Divergence of Music in Video Games and Film will be published in 2025.

***************************************************************************************************

Global Music Society Jam Sessions

Shirley Mak (Brown University)

Jam sessions are often seen as spontaneous events where musicians improvise together in easy conversation. What may not be apparent are the genre-specific conventions and shared musical idioms that drive such jams, such as in bluegrass or jazz jam sessions. What happens when jam sessions are organized as part of an intercultural experience? Almost annually since 2015, musicians with diverse musical and cultural backgrounds have collaborated in bands led by a faculty of professional musicians at the weeklong summer Global Musician Workshop (GMW). The workshop features nightly jam sessions that are optional, but are often well attended. These jam sessions usually include a national or cultural “theme,” such as “Persian/Iranian” or “Chinese.”

     Given the interculturality of the workshop, GMW jam sessions seemingly confirm the idea that music can forge bonds across cultural boundaries with more ease than spoken language. However, the diversity of the participants’ backgrounds also meant that not everyone felt equally comfortable participating in the jam sessions. Drawing on observations of past GMW sessions, and from interviews with participants, faculty, and administrators, I explore the GMW jam sessions as a space of cultural encounters. How do varying types of musical expertise affect the jamming experience? What are some unique obstacles and rewards? What might be the shared language of these intercultural jam sessions? By addressing these questions, I hope to contribute to the broader discourse around music as a means of community building and connection across cultural boundaries.

 

Shirley Mak is a Musicology/Ethnomusicology Ph.D. candidate at Brown University. Her dissertation research focuses on intercultural collaborative music making within the Silkroad Ensemble and Global Musician Workshop. Her interests also include issues of music and identity, the impact of globalization on music (including the diasporic and transnational in music studies, and world music), and the inclusion of postcolonial theories and global discourses in Western classical music pedagogy. She received her M.A. in Musicology from the University of Amsterdam, and her B.A. in Music from Queens College, CUNY.

Battle of the Bands: Adolphe Sax’s Sonic Fusillades and the Military Politics of Timbral Homogeneity

Samuel T. Nemeth (Ohio Wesleyan University)

The April 22, 1845 performance contest on the Champ de Mars—which Patrick Péronnet labeled a “musical war” and which I refer to as a “Battle of the Bands”—sparked comparisons between the new instruments of Belgian inventor Adolphe Sax and French military weaponry. Contemporary eyewitness accounts and satire from Le Charivari depicted players “armed” with weapons and even “slain” musical combatants. This event demonstrated the inextricability of militarism and musical instrumentation in mid-nineteenth century France. As I argue, the French military’s quest to improve its soundworld by adopting Sax’s instruments was inseparable from its standardizing of artillery (Valée) and its improving the lethality of its long-barreled firearms (Delvigne). Sax’s instruments provided audibility outdoors, high volume levels, and timbral homogeneity, delivering a massed core of sound—a tight grouping of “musical bullets”—with a high degree of accuracy.

But such a concentration of sound could also be dangerous. Reception of Sax’s instruments, including Sax trumpets and the gargantuan Bourdon Saxhorn, frequently described their destructive power. And in 1852, Sax unveiled his new Saxtubas during Halévy’s opera, Le Juif errant, and at a military ceremony on the Champ de Mars. Witnessing their massive volume and high concentration of sound, Le Ménestrel suggested that these “artillery of brass” would make the trumpets of Jericho seem miniscule and could cause listeners’ ears to bleed. Musical bombardments thus went hand-in-hand with an increasingly lethal military enterprise, fulfilling a definition of “sonic warfare” more than 150 years before Steve Goodman described the concept.

“To Promote and Sustain”: A Case Study for Race, Gender, and Music in Women’s Barbershop Quartet Singing in the 1950s

Justin Sextro  (Southern Illinois University, Carbondale)

 

This paper examines the Belles of Harmony, a women’s barbershop chorus from Peoria, Illinois, and their engagement with barbershop ideology in the 1950s. When they formed in 1948, the Belles entered a musical field dominated by white male performers and organizations, most notably the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America (SPEBSQSA). Although a similar organization for women, Sweet Adelines, Incorporated (SAI), was founded three years before the Belles of Harmony, the public perception of barbershop as a male-dominated genre—characterized by four men in boater hats and striped vests—was already firmly established.

 

I argue that the participation of the Belles of Harmony in barbershop singing complicates our understanding of how race, gender, and music intersected in the formation and negotiation of barbershop ideology. Previous scholarship has deconstructed the racial mythologies associated with the genre, showing its debt to Black musical traditions; however, less attention has been paid to the role of women in shaping both barbershop’s musical and ideological discourse. Drawing on archival materials related to the Belles of Harmony’s 1950s choral concerts, I examine how this group positioned itself socially, musically, and ideologically within the barbershop tradition. These documents reveal that the Belles foregrounded women’s barbershop talent while also engaging with preexisting racial ideologies. As an independent organization that later joined Sweet Adelines, Inc., the Belles of Harmony provide a unique lens through which to broaden the historical narrative of organized barbershop singing and deepen our understanding of how gender and race were negotiated in mid-twentieth-century American music.

 

Justin Sextro is Assistant Professor and Humanities Librarian at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. He is also PhD candidate in musicology at the University of Kansas. In addition to his work on women’s barbershop quartets, he actively researches music in video games. He has presented his work at the Society for American Music and the American Musicological Society.

A Gift from the Union of Soviet Composers: A Regendl by Grigori Kompaneyets

David Schiller (University of Georgia)

 

Grigori Kompaneyets (1881-1959) was a Ukrainian Jewish composer. Early in his career, he was associated with the (Russian) New Jewish School, and in the late 1920s, he worked in Palestine with the Habima Theatre. In the 1930s, he returned to the Soviet Union and worked there successfully, as a composer, conductor, and teacher. From 1940 to 1952, he was a professor at the Kyiv Conservatory.

As this biographical sketch suggests, Kompaneyets has a place in at least three music histories: Ukrainian, Soviet, and Jewish. But he also has a place in American music history! Among his other accomplishments, he composed A Regendl, a modern choral setting of a Yiddish children's song by Joel Engel. This piece had a significant role in the field of cultural diplomacy: it was presented as a gift from the Union of Soviet Composers to John Finley Williamson and the Westminster Chorus during their visit to Moscow, in 1934.

When the Westminster Chorus returned to the United States, Williamson gave A Regendl a prominent place in the group's repertoire, including a Carnegie Hall premiere. Thirty years later, in 1964, the Carey College Chorale in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, made the only known recording of A Regendl. Nevertheless, errors of mistranslation and misattribution, apparently dating back to Williamson himself, effectively erased Kompaneyets from A Regendl's American reception. He remains largely unmentioned in English-language musicology, and there is no entry for him in Grove Online. This presentation will reintroduce him to the Greater New York musicological community.

David Schiller is a musicologist and a retired faculty member of the Hugh Hodgson School of Music, University of Georgia, where he taught a wide range of courses in music history and music in general studies. His post-retirement publications include “Sacred Service: The Mass Bloch Never Wrote, the Two that Leonard Bernstein Did Write, and Shulamit Ran’s Credo/Ani Ma’amin,” in Ernest Bloch Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and “The Shakespearean World of Music,” co-authored with the late Christy Desmet, in The Shakespearean World (Routledge, 2017). He is currently working with Joel Overall, Belmont University, on an edited collection of Kenneth Burke’s music and writings about music. His interest in the Ukrainian-Jewish composer Grigory Kompaneyets (1881-1959) grew out of this related exploration of New York City concert life in the 1920s and 1930s, especially as reflected in Burke’s concert reviews.