AMSGNY Meetings

 

The Winter meeting of the AMSGNY will take place online on Saturday, February 7, 2026.  The Zoom code is

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/4861123413?pwd=c0podGRzbVVtZnUwd2pBMGpFVm41UT09

 

Schedule:

Discussion and Voting on a Few Issues 10-10:15

 

Session 1 10:15-11:15

Locating Julius Eastman, Asking Toward the Archive

Gia Dreyer, Hunter College - CUNY

 

Compositional “Translation” in Unsuk Chin’s Operascope (2023), Subito con forza (2020), and Frontispiece (2019)

Ji Yeon Lee  (University of Houston)

 

Session 2  11:30-12:30

The Ballad as Art Song: Kim Dong-Ryul's Classical Appropriations and the Reconfiguration of Korean Popular Music

Mi Kyung Hwang

Laura Marling: Religiously Nontheistic 

Murray Nielsen (University of Ottawa)

 

Session 3  1-2:30
The Musical Aesthetic: A Poetic Touch of Zhaoyi's "Longing for My Love." in Contemporary Chinese Piano Composition

Edy Panjaitan (Ohio University)

Forging a Nation Identity--The 1790 Collection of Russian Folksongs  with Their Tunes Set to Music by Ivan Peach

Artis Wodehouse  (Bronx, NY)

 

 “Odd Angles and Trick Floors”: A Closer Look at the Horn Trios of Johannes Brahms and György Ligeti

Ayden Adler (University of Houston-Downtown)

Abstracts and Biographies

 

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“Odd Angles and Trick Floors”: A Closer Look at the Horn Trios of Johannes Brahms and György Ligeti

 Ayden Adler

 

Abstract:

In 1982, Ligeti completed his Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano and subtitled it “Hommage à Brahms,” recalling Brahms’s Trio, Op. 40, composed for the same instrumentation. This homage, however, is more problematic than it originally appears. In numerous interviews, Ligeti vehemently disavowed any connection to Brahms beyond the subtitle of the work. Critics and scholars who commented upon the subtitle soon after its publication (e.g., Griffiths (1983), Morton (1996), Steinitz (1996), Searby (2001)), took Ligeti’s assertion at face value and failed to seek any substantive connections between the two Trios. This paper, however, calls upon Bloom’s theory of “the anxiety of influence,” the composer’s own caveat that the work contains “odd angles and trick floors,” and argues that Ligeti’s claim is, in fact, counterintuitive.

My detailed analysis illustrates how Brahms’s influence on this work first emerges formally, in the structure of the work, and continues to pervade each movement, materializing in evermore subtle details, including the use of horn fifths, hemiolas, and horn calls. Ligeti’s and Brahms’s attitudes to their musical pasts additionally intertwine in their Horn Trios: the use of the natural horn in both works links the composers’ attempts to engage nostalgically with timbres and colors in music of the past, grieve the futility of returning, and wrestle with the impossibility of going forward. This critical look at these two exemplars of the horn trio genre reaches a more nuanced understanding of Ligeti’s Trio and aligns with current research on Ligeti’s late works and the composer’s fraught relationship to the musical past.

 

Bio: With degrees from Princeton University (A.B.), the Juilliard School (M.M.), and the Eastman School of Music (M.A., D.M.A., Ph.D. (Musicology)), Dr. Ayden Adler serves as Associate Professor at the University of Houston-Downtown. After winning the Society for American Music’s Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award, Dr. Adler has balanced musicological research, presenting, and publishing with performance and administrative work, including performing for ten years as a tenured member of the horn section of the Rochester (NY) Philharmonic Orchestra while teaching at the Eastman School of Music; serving as Executive Director of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra after leading the Education and Community Partnerships departments at the Atlanta and Philadelphia Orchestras; and serving as Dean of the Conservatory at Michael Tilson Thomas’ New World Symphony and as Dean of the School of Music at DePauw University. While her research on György Ligeti harks back to her horn-playing years, she is concurrently working on a book project, Orchestrating Whiteness: Serge Koussevitzky, Arthur Fiedler, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, under contract with the University of Illinois Press, to address the historical roots of systemic racism in classical music in the United States.

 

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Locating Julius Eastman, Asking Toward the Archive

Gia Dreyer, Hunter College - CUNY

 

Abstract:

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.

 

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The Ballad as Art Song: Kim Dong-Ryul's Classical Appropriations and the Reconfiguration of Korean Popular Music

Mi Kyung Hwang

 

K-pop scholarship has overwhelmingly defined the genre through idol-centered dance music, visual spectacle, and choreography. Yet this framing obscures a crucial paradox: unlike dance-oriented idol music, Korean ballads have long functioned as a cross-generational, nationally shared genre. Despite this central cultural role, ballads remain marginalized in K-pop scholarship.

Keith Howard's[1] influential work traces Korean popular music transformation through the late 1990s, emphasizing ballads' importance in earlier media structures, but does not address stylistic developments in the 2000s. Hwang[2] examines 1990s-2000s K-pop ballads through political-economic perspectives, yet a sustained in-depth musicological study of Kim Dong-Ryul’s broader compositional output remains absent.

This paper addresses these omissions by focusing on Kim Dong-Ryul (b. 1974), whose profound contributions to Korean popular music transformed the ballad into art songs. Through musical analysis, I investigate how Kim integrates classical and jazz idioms into popular ballad structures, elevating the genre to art song sophistication while maintaining broad appeal. His work exemplifies K-pop modernization grounded in listening, stillness, and composer-led authorship rather than spectacle—a paradigm shift that reconfigured ballads' artistic legitimacy within Korean musical culture.

Kim has remained an active singer-songwriter for nearly three decades, demonstrating this tradition's enduring relevance. Despite his transformative influence, his music has received virtually no scholarly attention in English-language musicology. By centering Korean ballads as a national genre and foregrounding Kim Dong-Ryul's elevation of ballads to art song level, this paper reframes K-pop history beyond dance music and argues for the analytical necessity of ballads within global popular music studies.

 

[1] Keith Howard, "Exploding Ballads: The Transformation of Korean Pop Music," in Global Goes Local: Popular Culture in Asia, ed. Timothy J. Craig and Richard King (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002), 80–95.

[2] Mi Kyung Hwang, "Narratives of Modernization in K-Pop Ballads from the 1990s to 2000s" (paper presented at the AMS-SMT Joint Annual Meeting, 2025).

 Biography :

Mi Kyung Hwang has presented papers at 15 regional, national, and international conferences, including AMS regional and national meetings.  She served as Assistant Professor and Chair of Music Department at Talladega College and Coordinator of Piano Studies at Georgia State University Perimeter College, and currently serves as Choir Director and Organist at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Jasper, AL.

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Compositional “Translation” in Unsuk Chin’s Operascope (2023), Subito con forza (2020), and Frontispiece (2019)

Ji Yeon Lee  (University of Houston)

 Abstract:

The Korean composer Unsuk Chin has used the past—history, tradition, and memory—as a source of inspiration, motivation, compositional technique, instrumentation, and conceptual frameworks. Yet while her musical language and compositional style often show the influence of composers such as Bartók, Stravinsky, and Ligeti, she has only explicitly acknowledged referencing the sounds and styles of past composers or genres in a few recent works. This is evident in works such as Operascope (2023), Subito con forza (2020), and Frontispiece (2019). Even in these pieces, Chin eschews straightforward quotations or easily identifiable borrowings. Instead, her approach relies on large-scale concepts and allusion. For instance, she describes Operascope as a reflection on the history of opera—a “powerhouse of emotions”—incorporating subtle, conceptual influences from Verdi, Puccini, and Berg. Conversely, Subito con forza and Frontispiece serve as her (twisted) homages to the European symphonic tradition.

Drawing on Chin’s idea that “gestures typical of specific works and composers are ‘translated’ into one another in different and sometimes unexpected ways,” this paper examines Chin’s compositional “translations” as manifested in the three pieces. To clarify this concept as a core compositional strategy, I will draw on Harold Bloom’s notion of the “anxiety of influence,” focusing on how she negotiates with and reinterprets the musical legacy of her precursors. Through this exploration, this study provides deeper insights into Chin’s sophisticated engagement with the Western canon and her unique perspective on the tradition within the globalized landscape of contemporary music.

Laura Marling: Religiously Nontheistic 

Murray Nielsen (University of Ottawa)

 

Abstract:  God is no foreigner to Laura Marling’s lyrics, though the way she positions the concept is neither Christian in practice nor secular. Releasing eight studio albums in sixteen years, Marling has positioned herself as one of the leading folk artists in modern times. Marling identifies as an atheist and has said that she is “not religious by any means,” (2024) though her music contains extensive religious themes and Christian references. “I see the language of religion as more of a metaphor for internal strife and passion,” (2020) she explains.

 

Through comparative religious discourse, this paper includes a visual and lyrical analysis of Marling’s music video for her song “Sophia” which takes place in a church. Depending on the album, Christian and religious themes are present in 30-73% of her songs. Though sometimes explicitly critical as in her song “Typical” where she lyrically “condemns all religion to a pitiless end,” Marling’s secular approach to religious material is not generally pejoratively shrouded. Using Paul Linden’s (2016) methodology of insistency-based lyrical analysis, this paper catalogs and examines Marling’s use of religious themes. Marling is a product of the societal secularization happening in modern England, a process that is driving the evolution towards a “post-(ir)religious secular society” (Lois Lee, 2014) which is demonstrated by her secular use of religious reference. The themes Marling incorporated into a majority of her music seem to have evolved from their original religiosity to that of a relatable humanistic and artistic meta language.

 

Bio:

Murray Nielsen is a PhD student at the University of Ottawa in the Music and Interdisciplinary program. They hold a BA from Bishop's University and a MA in Musicology from Dalhousie University. Their research examines the connection between the music of the band The Killer and the Latter-Day Saint's hymnal.

 

The Musical Aesthetic: A Poetic Touch of Zhaoyi's "Longing for My Love." in Contemporary Chinese Piano Composition

Edy Panjaitan (Ohio University)

Abstract:

In this lecture-performance, I examine the musical aesthetic of Dan Zhaoyi’s Longing for My Love (思恋), a piano work arranged in 1991 from Gu Jianfen’s art song That Is Me (1982), situating it within the broader context of contemporary Chinese piano composition. Rather than treating the piece as a simple transcription, this study argues that Zhaoyi’s piano composition articulates a distinctly poetic mode of musical expression, one grounded in lyric restraint, cyclical return, and textural resonance. Dan Zhaoyi is one of most influential piano educators and performers, often regarded as the “godfather” of piano education in China.

Drawing on concepts from Chinese lyrical aesthetics;shū qíng chuán tǒng (抒情传统, 意境), literally tradition of expressing emotion and contemporary musicological discourse on transcription of an art song. The study explores how vocal nostalgia is transformed into an instrumental soundscape. Modal inflection, flexible meter, and layered pianistic voicing function as poetic devices that suspend narrative progression and instead cultivate an affective atmosphere of longing. The melodic line, often embedded in the middle register, evokes the remembered human voice while resisting overt dramatic climax.

Through close musical analysis, the study demonstrates how Longing for My Love reflects a contemporary Chinese pianistic sensibility in which personal memory, pedagogical lineage, and cultural affect converge. The work thus exemplifies a poetic aesthetic that privileges intimacy, inwardness, and emotional resonance over virtuosic display, contributing a significant voice to modern Chinese piano repertoire.

Bio:

Edy Panjaitan is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Arts. He studies with Dr. Garret Field with a primary focus in musicology/ethnomusicology and with Dr. Christopher Fisher, with a secondary emphasis in piano performance. His work bridges Eastern and Western pianistic traditions, bringing cross-cultural perspectives and artistic dialogue to the concert stage. He will present his final doctoral recital on April 11, 2026, at Robert Glidden Hall, Ohio University, featuring an interdisciplinary program that spans Eastern-inspired and Western piano repertoire alongside his own original piano composition, inspired by the Toba Batak musical tradition of gondang sabangunan.

Forging a Nation Identity--The 1790 Collection of Russian Folksongs  with Their Tunes Set to Music by Ivan Peach

Artis Wodehouse  (Bronx, NY)

Abstract:  First published in 1790, the Collection of Russian Folk Songs with Their Tunes Set to Music by Ivan Peach is considered by the late Richard Taruskin to be "the greatest and most culturally significant of Russian folk collections”. Tunes from the anthology became a vital source for later Russian composers, from Glinka to Stravinsky. Notably, several tunes from the collection — referred to as LPC —were also used by Beethoven in his Op. 59 Razumovsky Quartets.

 

The anthology of 100 songs was the result of the collaboration between Czech-born composer Ivan Pratch (ca. 1750-1818 — his name was mis-spelled) and the prolific Russian polymath of the Enlightenment, Nikolai Lvov (1753-1803). The songs are scored on three staves in standard notation. The top staff features the melody with lyrics.  The bottom two staffs are intended for a keyboardist: one staff doubles the melody in the right hand, and the other fills in a traditionally harmonized left hand accompaniment.

 

Lvov’s preface reflects ideas of the time that centered on the rise of Russian national identity.  He groups songs according to defined categories: slower, non-danceable songs; ancient songs; songs of more recent origin; dance songs; outdoor and ritual songs, and Ukrainian songs.

 

Wodehouse will provide an overview musical analysis of each type and demonstrate salient examples on her restored 1827 Tomlinson square piano.

 

Bio: Pianist, harmoniumist, pianolist and  MIDI editor, independent scholar Artis Wodehouse has devoted her career to preserving and disseminating neglected but valuable music and instruments from the past. She maintains a personal collection of antique pianos, reed organs and European harmoniums on which she performs, records and creates videos for YouTube.