Schedule for Fall Meeting, along with sign up link.
0 Comments Published by AMSGNY President on Wednesday, September 3, 2025 at 9:55 PM.
The fall meeting will take place at the CUNY Graduate Center, room 3491, on Saturday, September 13th.
10 AM to 12 Noon—Music
and Controversy
Political Expression in the Music
of Steve Lacy
Daniel Blake
(John Jay College)
The Not-So-Secrets of True Womanhood: Performing Liza
Lehmann’s Secrets of the Heart
Lindsay Campbell (Graduate Center)
Fétis, Gobineau, Wagner, Schenker: Continuities and Discontinuities in the History
of Music Theory
Barry Wiener (Bronx, NY)
A Far-Away Place and Some Strange-Sounding
Names: Bert Williams and George Walker Visit Abyssinia
John Graziano (Graduate Center and City College)
12 Noon to 12:30 PM—Lunch
12:30-12:45—Business Meeting
12:45 to 2:45 PM—Mostly
Chopin
Falling
Between the Cracks: Domestic Classical
U.S. A. Piano Music, 1936-1946
Artis
Wodehouse (Bronx, NY)
The
Cultivation of Touch and the Personified Voice of Chopin’s Pleyel of 1848, No. 14810
MyungJin Oh (Rutgers University)
An Odyssey of Madness: Melancholia, Nostalgia, and
Obsession in Chopin's Op. 50, No. 3
Emily A. Travaline (The
Graduate Center, CUNY)
Between Tempest and Poetry: A Performative
Interpretation of Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2
Edy Rapika Panjaitan (Ohio
University)
Fall Meeting--September 13, 2025 at CUNY Graduate Center--Abracts and Bios
0 Comments Published by AMSGNY President on at 9:53 PM.
Daniel Blake
(John Jay College)
This
presentation explores political expression in the early music of pioneering
soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy (1934-2004). Of particular interest to this
study is a transition in Lacy’s music from the 1960s, in which radical
aesthetic experimentation was a political act unto itself, to the early 1970s
when more explicit anti-war messages began to appear in his compositions.
Lacy’s political understanding emerged out of the economic hardship and
aesthetic marginalization he experienced in New York’s free jazz scene, which
he described as a “politics of survival”. The presentation examines the
development of this early political understanding through a set of ambitious
experiments in collective improvisations he undertook with the groundbreaking
electro-acoustic ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva. By the 1970s, Lacy’s growing
interest in poetry led him to develop new compositional strategies with his own
bands, out of which a more overt political expression emerged. Through excerpts
of recordings and scores from his early political works, the presentation
argues for a fruitful connection in Steve Lacy’s musical career between
experimental aesthetics on the one hand and direct political expression on the
other.
Bio:
Multi-instrumentalist
and composer Daniel Blake is an active member of New York’s improvised and
contemporary music scene, and also serves as Assistant Professor at John Jay
College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) in New York City. He is the recipient of a
New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in music, and has worked as a
composer and performer with a wide range of artists including Esperanza
Spalding, Mivos Quatet, Anthony Braxton’s Tricentric Orchestra, Julian Lage and
many others. His ballet Got My Wings was the
recipient of a 2023 Humanities New York grant, and will be released as an album
in fall 2025 on Adhyâropa Records.
Fétis, Gobineau, Wagner, Schenker: Continuities and Discontinuities in the History of Music Theory
Barry Wiener (Bronx, NY)
When the American
music theorist Philip Ewell prepared his epochal work on racism in American
music theory, Christensen reached out to him in support, aiding him in making
crucial connections in the history of racism in music theory and its
manifestations in the United States. Ewell coupled the fruits of Christensen’s
research with his own investigation into the life and work of the Viennese
music theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935), demonstrating that Schenker
mentioned Gobineau five times in his diary, as well as in The Mission
of German Genius (1921). Armed with this knowledge, Ewell was able to
“close the circle,” asserting that there was a continuity of racist thought in
music theory that began with Gobineau and found its most sinister expression in
the ideas of Schenker.
Christensen never
closely examined the parallels between Gobineau’s treatise and Fétis’s Histoire
générale. Rather, he invited future scholars to investigate their
correspondences of racist language and ideas. In this paper, I accept
Christensen’s challenge. In addition, I examine Schenker’s engagement with the
ideas of both Wagner and Gobineau.
Bio:
Barry Wiener is a musicologist specializing in nineteenth and twentieth-century
music, sketch studies, Scandinavian music, and Jewish history and its relation
to music. Wiener’s publications include articles about Ralph Shapey, Jean
Sibelius, Heinrich Schenker, Per Nørgård, Ursula Mamlok, and Akemi Naito. He
co-edited the Ralph Shapey special issue of Contemporary Music
Review (2008) and wrote liner notes for six CDs of Mamlok's music on
CRI and Bridge. Wiener has presented his research about nineteenth, twentieth,
and twenty-first century music at regional, national, and international
conferences in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Israel.
A
Far-Away Place and Some Strange-Sounding Names:
Bert
Williams and George Walker Visit Abyssinia
John Graziano (Graduate Center and
City College)
Musical theater has always thrived on the exotic. From the
late nineteenth century through the twentieth, the action of many shows has
been set in places that theatergoers would recognize, such as Coney Island or
Asbury Park; shows have also been set in imaginary or foreign cities and
countries, such as Gerolstein and Greenwillow. Two early Black musical shows
are set in Africa; they explore how life in these exotic countries differs from
that experienced by Americans. The first play, In Dahomey, was
written between 1899 and 1902 by a number of playwrights. It is partially set
in the West African country of Dahomey, which is now the southern part of
Benin. The second play, Abyssinia, by Jesse A. Shipp (1864-1934),
is set entirely in that country, which today is part of Ethiopia and Eritrea.
It is a somewhat satirical commentary on the back-to-Africa movement, which was
on the minds of many African Americans, especially after the resurgence of
segregation at the close of the nineteenth century. In this presentation, I
examine how Shipp, through the characters of some visiting American tourists,
addresses the issue of returning to the African homeland by his comparisons of
the realities of life in America with that of an actual African kingdom. I also
demonstrate how the music by Will Marion Cook and Bert Williams complements the
thrust of the script.
Bio: John Graziano
is Professor Emeritus of Music at the Music Departments of The Graduate Center
and The City College of the City University of New York. He is Director
of Music in Gotham, a database project, which is documenting
musical events in New York City from September 1862 through August 1875. His
recent publications include the book European Music and Musicians in
New York City, 1840-1900, and chapters and articles on John Phillip Sousa,
Harry Burleigh, and the “Black Patti”; theater orchestras in nineteenth century
New York City; Edward MacDowell’s symphonic poems, Lamia and Hamlet
and Ophelia; “Race and Racism” in the Oxford Handbook of Opera; and
“The Many Faces of Rio Rita” in The Oxford Handbook of
Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations.
Falling Between the Cracks:
Domestic Classical U.S. A. Piano
Music, 1936-1946
Artis Wodehouse (Bronx, NY)
Those
who began musical training at the piano undoubtedly remember
encountering
educational piano music anthologies Meant to develop music
reading
and technical skill, these graded folios also introduced intermediate-level
repertoire
from the European canon. Easier music of Bach, Schumann, Mozart and
the like
was central to these publications, since the cumulative goal was fostering
appreciation
and understanding of the music by European masters. Such folios
remain
in use.
But
during the first half of the 20th century a large and diverse cohort of native
United
States composers emerged. The media visibility generated by these home-
grown
U.S. classical composers and the unprecedented diversity of their
compositional
styles suggested a new but similar endeavor. In the late 1930s music
publishers
Carl Fischer, E. G Marks, Music Corporation of American, Theodore
Presser
and others either approached or were approached by recognized living U.S.
composers
to write original piano pieces designed for pedagogical purpose. A
surprising
number were both willing and able to write even one-page compositions
creatively
distilling primary aspects of piano technique within their respectively
distinctive
compositional approaches. Found in often difficult to locate and
forgotten
anthologies, these short piano pieces offer a startling capsule summary of
the
multi-faceted U.S. classical music voice that became established during the
20th
Century.
The
presentation will reference examples by Walter Piston, Aaron Copland, Henry
Cowell,
Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, Wallingford Riegger, Roger Sessions, and
William
Schuman.
Bio:
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.
She has developed an extensive footprint on YouTube that features
musical performances, interviews and tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP2xElP5-hgJhjqKRWWHOpA
The Cultivation of Touch and the Personified Voice of
Chopin’s Pleyel of 1848, No. 14810
MyungJin Oh (Rutgers
University)
In
1834, August Kahlert described Chopin’s “manner of playing” as “a denial of
heaviness, based on maximum reciprocal independence of the fingers and on the
lightest touch.” While Kahlert’s observation highlights Chopin’s uniquely
cultivated touch, it fails to explain how Chopin imagined sounds through the
material technology of the piano. How can we better understand the relationship
between Chopin’s tactile experiences, the mechanical features of the piano, and
the resulting tone quality, so often praised by his contemporaries?
This presentation examines this relationship through Fryderyk
Chopin’s Projet de Méthode and his 1848 Pleyel piano, No.
14810, located in the Chopin Museum in Warsaw. Applying Deirdre Loughridge’s
notion of “personification,” I argue that regarding the Pleyel piano as a
nonhuman entity with “its own soul” allows us to define its “personified
voice”—a responsive sonic agent shaped by the pianist’s physical and expressive
input. My case study combines Chopin’s own accounts of well-formed technique,
contemporaneous descriptions of his performance, organological research, and my
own tactile engagement with Chopin’s 1848 Pleyel. Together, these perspectives
suggest how the cultivated touch of a historically informed pianist can
reanimate the sonic world of Chopin and broaden our understanding of the
performer-instrument relationship in early nineteenth-century piano culture.
Biography: MyungJin Oh is a Lecturer in Musicology at Rutgers University,
where she earned a PhD in Musicology and a DMA in Piano Performance. Her
dissertation, Timbre in Chopin’s Parisian Piano Music, 1830s–1840s,
explores timbral phenomenology and aesthetics through the lenses of organology,
technology, and practice-based approaches, focusing on the Parisian music of
Fryderyk Chopin. From 2023 to 2025, she served as an Editorial Assistant for
reviews at the Journal of the American Musicological Society, where
she also contributed a review of Deirdre Loughridge’s Sounding Human:
Music and Machines, 1740–2020.
An Odyssey of
Madness: Melancholia, Nostalgia, and Obsession in Chopin's Op. 50, No. 3
Emily A.
Travaline, The Graduate Center, CUNY
This paper investigates to what extent
Frederic Chopin's Mazurka Op. 50, No. 3 expresses the nineteenth-century notion
of madness. My analysis of this particular Mazurka is preceded by a history of
Chopin and propositions of his madness: that is, his tendencies toward
melancholia, obsession, and nostalgia. Heavily emphasized in my argument is the
suggestion that Chopin's music itself uniquely contradicts Romantic treatises
of his time, thus supporting my assertion that his repertoire is ironic and
contradictory to the reigning Romantic paradigm. This claim is supported by my
comparing the accounts of George Sand to accounts of Frederick Niecks: what
Niecks aestheticizes in Chopin's music, Sand situates within the reality of
what the composer actually felt. Supported by the composer's own journals and a
curiosity maintained in modern scholarship, I investigate the ways in which
this Mazurka musically substantiates madness via the three aforementioned
nineteenth-century phenomena. Greatly supported by case studies of leading
nineteenth-century psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Jean-Étienne Esquirol, I
contend that Chopin's personality expressed through his diaries may ultimately
indicate a disabled person of the time - or, rather, one experiencing bouts of madness.
Finally, by further referencing the peculiarities in Chopin's musical language
as they contradict ideas brought forth by Gustav Schilling and Peter
Lichtenthal, I argue Chopin's repertoire is ironically beautiful in its
fracturing of Romantic beauty - not in its upholding of it.
Bio: Emily A. Travaline is a third-year PhD student at The
Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research focuses
primarily on nineteenth-century aesthetics, absurdist philosophy, and
disability studies. She currently lectures at Baruch College in New York City.
The Not-So-Secrets of True Womanhood:
Performing Liza Lehmann’s Secrets of the Heart
Lindsay Campbell (Graduate
Center, City University of New York)
Liza Lehmann wrote more than 300 works across many genres,
yet studies of her repertoire remain few and far between. While previous
scholars have drawn attention primarily to her songs and song cycles, Lehmann’s
stage works offer a window into theatrical performance in Victorian England. My
paper analyzes the intersection of gender and the body in Lehmann’s 1895 The
Secrets of the Heart, a fully staged scene chalk full of feminized
characteristics particularly ripe for a gendered embodied analysis. Locating
the site of analysis in my own performance of the scene, my research
foregrounds the singers’ experiences, interactions with each other, and with
Lehmann via the score, by drawing on recorded rehearsals and interviews, a
method inspired by Elisabeth LeGuin’s Boccherini’s Body. I argue
that The Secrets of the Heart is so entrenched in Victorian
values, that following the instructions of the libretto, and particularly the
score, necessitated an embodiment of ‘True Womanhood’ through gendered bodily
techniques. Simultaneously, I highlight the ways in which my collaborator and I
pushed back against ‘True Womanhood’ with our own 21st-century gender
performance. My embodied analysis of The Secrets of the Heart not
only draws attention to a little-studied composer and scene, but also
demonstrates the ways such analyses can enrich discussions of pieces for which
only a score survives.
Bio:
Lindsay
Campbell is a musicologist, choral educator, and singer currently pursuing a
PhD in Musicology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Her research focuses on British and American women song composers at the turn
of the 20th century. Before beginning her studies at The Graduate Center,
Lindsay taught choir in the Michigan public schools for six years. She holds an
MM in choral conducting and a BM in music education and vocal performance from
Michigan State University. Always a performer at heart, Lindsay
incorporates performance into her research, seeking out rarely performed or
unrecorded works to study, record, and share with the world.
Between Tempest and Poetry: A Performative Interpretation of Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2
Edy Rapika Panjaitan
(Ohio University)
Frédéric Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 31 (1837) stands as one of the composer’s most celebrated large-scale piano works, a piece in which drama and lyricism coalesce into a uniquely Chopinian aesthetic. Unlike the style brillant of his earlier period, this Scherzo embodies what might be called “dynamic romanticism”: muscular, tempestuous gestures juxtaposed with passages of poetic intimacy. Its Beethovenian opening, structured in reprise form yet constantly straining against formal boundaries, sets into motion a drama of unprecedented intensity. The work’s harmonic richness, motivic transformation, and rhythmic propulsion continually destabilize expectation, culminating in a resolution not in the tonic but in the luminous relative key of D-flat major.
The
central trio, in D-flat major, transports listeners into an Arcadian world of
lyricism. It unfolds in three distinct guises: first as a bucolic sicilienne,
then as a waltz-like polyphony with four voices singing simultaneously, and
finally as a ritornel dance. This idyllic vision is ultimately shattered as
Chopin transforms pastoral lyricism into passionate agitation. The coda crowns
the work with unbridled energy, reaffirming its stature as a masterpiece of
Romantic pianism. In this lecture-performance, I will explore the musicological
and aesthetic dimensions of the Scherzo no 2 while demonstrating interpretive
strategies at the keyboard.
Edy is currently a Ph.D. candidate in
Interdisciplinary Arts (Artist-Scholar Track) at Ohio University, where he
studies piano under Professor Christopher Fisher and conducts research with
Professor Garret Field. Edy received a Student Enhancement Award from Ohio
University to conduct ethnographic research in Samosir Island, North Sumatera,
Indonesia. He is working on dissertation research in Southeast Asian
studies, with a focus on the music and life cycle rituals of the Toba Batak
people of North Sumatra, Indonesia.
