AMSGNY Meetings

 

 

Political Expresssion In the Music of Steve Lacy

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.

 

Locating Julius Eastman, Asking Toward the Archive
Gia Dreyer (Hunter College)

 

The composer-performer Julius Eastman is a name with further recognition and scholarship than prior to his death. This revived notoriety proliferated as a result of the digital age–mass audiences have now encountered Eastman’s work through the CD set Unjust Malaise and its existence on the internet. In this paper, I reflect on Julius Eastman’s posthumous existence by returning to the question posed in the title of Renate Strauss’s seminal article, “Julius Eastman: Will the Real One Stand Up?” This is a reference to a television game show titled “To Tell The Truth,” where contestants had to discern the real celebrity against two other imposters. I follow this historical play in relation to contemporaneous themes of parasociality, critiquing the apparatuses of anti-blackness and homophobia that perpetuated the forgetting of Julius Eastman within his lifetime. The parasocial dynamic which reconstitutes Julius Eastman in memory for a subject is a far easier act than to acknowledge the manufactured denial of his humanity as he lived. These multiplicious violences establish the capacity for Julius Eastman to be none other than Eastman-for-another. Is Julius Eastman reified as a technology in the bare representation of the posthumous, the corpus in excess against the corporeal?

 

Bio:

Gia Dreyer (b. 2000) is a composer and ethnomusicologist from New Jersey. The relationship between the dissociation of identity in everyday experience and the incompleteness of aesthetic experience is expressed in their music praxis. In 2023, Gia enrolled in the Graduate Program at Hunter College, NYC. They are pursuing a dual master's degree in music composition and ethnomusicology to be completed by Fall 2025.

 

 

Fétis, Gobineau, Wagner, Schenker: Continuities and Discontinuities in the History of Music Theory

Barry Wiener (Bronx, NY)

 

During the 1830s and 40s, the Belgian music historian and theorist François-Joseph Fétis (1784-1871) played a significant role in the conceptualization of new, chromatic harmonic procedures in European music. However, in his final work, Histoire générale de la musique (1871), Fétis adopted racist views, which Thomas Christensen has outlined in his recent study of Fétis, Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis (2019). While researching Fétis’s papers, Christensen had noticed that the theorist owned a heavily annotated copy of Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (1855). Christensen hypothesized that Fétis drew some of his racist ideas from Gobineau’s treatise. Famously, Gobineau befriended Richard Wagner. Wagner praised the Essai, which was later utilized as a foundational document for Nazi ideology.  

 

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.