Fall 2024 Meeting--September 14 CUNY Graduate Center
0 Comments Published by AMSGNY President on Friday, August 23, 2024 at 2:15 PM.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.
Spring Meeting-- May 18, 2024
0 Comments Published by AMSGNY President on Thursday, May 2, 2024 at 6:22 PM.
The spring meeting of the Greater New York Chapter of the AMS
will take place on Saturday, May 18th, over Zoom. All are welcome to attend. The Zoom code is https://us02web.zoom.us/j/4861123413?pwd=c0podGRzbVVtZnUwd2pBMGpFVm41UT09
10-11 AM Session 1—Popular Song
Who Are You, Miss Simone?: Vocal Androgyneity and
the Acousmatic Question
Amanda Paruta (University
at Buffalo (SUNY)
An
“Over the Rainbow” Precedent? Nostalgia, Borrowing, and MGM’s THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)
Laura Lynn Broadhurst (Rutgers
University)
11:30-12
Business Meeting
12-12:30
Lunch Break
12:30-2:30 PM Session 2—Music from the 16th-19th
Centuries
A Tapestry of Devotion: The 12 Lassus Chansons in Simon Goulart’s Cinquante Pseaumes de David (Heidelberg 1597)
Bethany Brinson (Eastman School of Music)
An American Business Romance:
The Career of John Valentine Steger,
Piano Manufacturer
William
E Hettrick (Hofstra University)
Tancrède’s Crusade: A Military View of Campra’s Opera
Catherine
Ludlow (University of Washington)
Music Lessons for the Discerning Woman in Seventeenth Century Spain
Deborah Lawrence (St. Mary’s College of Maryland)
***
A Tapestry of Devotion: The 12 Lassus Chansons in Simon Goulart’s Cinquante
Pseaumes de David (Heidelberg 1597)
In 1597, Genevan Protestant cleric, poet, and editor
Simon Goulart (1543-1628) compiled the Cinquante Pseaumes de
David (Heidelberg 1597), a substantial volume of music printed by Jerôme
Commelin and dedicated to the Amsterdam Collegium Musicum. Of the 70
works within, 50 are strophic settings of Psalms set to compositions by Orlando
di Lasso, in a hybrid kind of contrafacta where Goulart artfully superimposes
pre-existing text onto Lassus’ pre-existing music. Lassus was
widely admired for his exceptional ability to integrate music with text in
moving and meaningful ways, thereby imbuing the music with a sensitivity and
poignancy that would have appealed to Goulart’s Protestant circles, even with
the altered texts (only sacred or “expurgated” texts were acceptable for
recreational singing). In what ways does
Goulart’s use of Lassus’ expressive abilities, particularly in the 12
five-voice French chansons featured, develop (and go beyond) the prevailing
intentions of chansons spirituelles in order to create a
"tapestry of devotion”? By examining the text-music enmeshment that
Goulart carefully weaves, I demonstrate Goulart’s prioritization of the
affections as the listener-performer becomes “one” with the words.
Curiously, as Simon Groot suggests, Goulart tries to
distance (rather than merely separate) listeners' attention from the original
chanson lyrics, while at the same time retaining the potent
text-united-to-music qualities. Distancing listener-performers from
associations may facilitate a personal internalization. By exploring
examples of affective integration in the twelve Lassus chansons, I illuminate
the ways in which Goulart’s decision-making, both in compilation and reworking,
takes inspiration from the music’s inherent expressive intentions.
Bethany graduated from Indiana University in 2022 with a B.M. in piano performance, a B.A. in mathematics (with highest distinction), and a minor in French. Motivated by the transformative power of music, she is pursuing a multifaceted career in teaching, writing, performing, composing, and collaborating. Outside of all things music, Bethany enjoys drawing, creative writing, birds, and spending time outdoors.
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Laura Lynn Broadhurst (Rutgers University)
In recent decades, the nostalgic reception of MGM’s The Wizard of Oz has led to considerable hagiography of the film. This paper challenges such adulatory commentary by disclosing a startling revelation: MGM’s more than likely borrowing of the title and opening plot device from a 1915 operetta entitled Over The Rainbow. I first clarify U.S. copyright law about titles, confirm the operetta’s popularity across the U.S. (particularly through 1929), and pose several key questions: did Oz lyricist Yip Harburg know about this operetta prior to his MGM assignment? Alternatively, did someone at MGM tell him about it? If so, who might that have been, and when could this have occurred? The ensuing discussion explores several topics: an overview of the operetta and its obvious parallels to MGM’s Oz (accompanied by images from a rare 1915 piano-vocal score acquired for this project); Harburg’s possible pre-Oz familiarity with the work; and numerous documented performances of the operetta in NYC (Harburg’s home city) and southern California (near innumerable MGM personnel). I then propose the most likely candidate to have introduced the operetta’s dramatic ideas to the 1939 movie: MGM screenwriter Florence Ryerson, with whom Harburg worked on Oz’s screenplay in spring/summer 1938. This crucial analysis is supported by several hitherto unpublished screenplay drafts from June 1938, demonstrating the operetta’s great impact on Oz’s prologue and Dorothy’s ever-famous ballad. A conclusion considers Harburg’s claims of having originally conceived the song’s title and narrative concept, especially in light of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Laura Lynn Broadhurst received her PhD in Musicology in 2020 from
Rutgers, where her dissertation presented the first archival study of Harold
Arlen and Yip Harburg’s songs for MGM’s THE
WIZARD OF OZ. In 2019, part of her dissertation was published as a chapter
within a multi-authored Oxford University Press volume, and she is currently
converting the entire manuscript for book publication. Broadhurst's principal
research interest is source study of mid-twentieth-century American musical
theater. Accordingly, she was invited by the Library of Congress to process
numerous Arlen-related artifacts. She has taught a variety of courses at
Rutgers and has presented widely.
Raised in the NYC metro area within a family of professional
musicians, Broadhurst was originally trained as a pianist and vocalist. Her
first BM (Piano Performance) is from the University of Northern Colorado, where
she was highly involved with UNC’s renowned vocal jazz program (highlighted by a GRAMMY award
nomination for UNC’s Vocal Jazz I).
She also holds a BM (Vocal Performance) and an MA (Music History) from the
University of Washington (graduate assistant to Larry Starr). Before reentering
academia for the PhD, Broadhurst was an active professional vocalist in
numerous genres, including opera, oratorio, art song, contemporary concert
music, jazz, and commercials/studio work.
----
The Career of John Valentine Steger,
Piano Manufacturer
William E Hettrick (Hofstra University)
Among the many German immigrants to America in the late nineteenth century who pursued piano manufacturing, Johann Valentin Steger stands out for his remarkable success. Arriving in New York in 1871 at the age of 17, he Americanized his name and became fluent in English. He held various jobs, earning enough capital to establish his first piano store in downtown Chicago in 1879. He had no experience in this field, but he possessed strong determination. In 1891 he opened his largest retail piano store, where he also began to manufacture his own instruments. The next step was his first factory, built in 1893 in a neighboring town that he paid to incorporate in 1896 as Steger, Illinois. As sales and profits increased, he enlarged his factory and created houses for his employees, offered at reasonable rates for rental or purchase. His charitable acts also included free Thanksgiving Day dinners for thousands of poor families, as well as profit-sharing benefits to his workmen, which averted the labor problems experienced by another empire-builder, George Pullman, in his own town not far away. Steger made only upright pianos until 1899, when he introduced a baby-grand model. He manufactured his pianos under two brands: his high-grade instrument with his own name, and a popular commercial line (openly advertised as a stencil piano) called the Singer. A newspaper considered his career “one of the business romances of America.” His 1909 nineteen-story Steger Building became a Chicago landmark. Steger had enemies, however, especially the trade-journal editor Marc Antony Blumenberg, who damned him as a tyrannical slave-driver. Steger sued for libel. His family blamed his sudden, dramatic death in 1916 on incitement caused by Blumenberg’s attack, but it couldn’t be proved. Carried on with some success by his two sons, Stager’s “business romance” was largely defunct by 1929 and was officially dissolved in 1949.
William E. Hettrick’s most recent publications are 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): 5–60; and Johann Herbeck: Selected Sacred Works, Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries 91 (A-R Editions, 2024).
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Music Lessons for the Discerning Woman in Seventeenth Century Spain
Deborah Lawrence
(St. Mary’s College of Maryland)
Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano is well-known as the first of several printed courtesy manuals in the early modern period. Such books explicitly demonstrated how to behave in aristocratic circles, including what one should know about music. At the same time, printed popular fiction implicitly provided behavior models. Two such literary works are those of María de Zayas (1637 and 1647, respectively) in which young noblewomen and men at a soiree in Madrid take turns telling tales, often performing songs within their accounts. Additionally, music is an important feature in the framing narrative of these stories.
In her prologue introducing the first of these two novellas, Zayas primarily addresses her male readers, accusing them of withholding education and, therefore, power from women. In the narrative her characters promote the value of education for women, highlighting music education. Zayas’ women characters write their own ballad poetry and sonnets, sometimes composing the music, and accompany themselves on various instruments.
Carmen Y. Hsu[1] asserts that mastering music was a component of women’s acquisition of power, not just for themselves but also for the status of the men who associated with them. This paper will show how that power is embodied and taught in Zayas’ tales.
[1] Carmen Y. Hsu, Courtesans in the Literature of Spanish Golden Age, with a prologue by Francisco Márquez Villanueva (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2002).
Tancrède’s Crusade: A Military View
of Campra’s Opera
Catherine Ludlow (University of Washington)
This paper will examine Tancrède from a military perspective. Antoine Danchet’s libretto will be compared with earlier versions of the Tancred story, and will be examined in light of contemporary French knowledge of the Crusades, such as that found in Louis Maimbourg’s influential Histoire des Croisades pour la délivrance de la Terre Sainte (1675). The paper will include discussion of the remaining dance choreographies, particularly the prologue’s sarabande, its military and societal implications, and how they may inform (and be informed by) related movements. Lastly, the goals and ideals of the prologue will be contrasted with the conclusion of the opera.
Catherine Ludlow is a doctoral student in music history at the University of Washington. Her current research explores notions of power (both military and magical) in French Baroque opera, and how this was manifested in dance. She previously focused on the long nineteenth century, examining French Realist set design c. 1900, and German settings of Lord Byron in the early 19th century.
Catherine provides course and technical support for the UW School of Public Health, occasionally teaches French Baroque dance in the Seattle area, and is the secretary-treasurer of the AMS Pacific Northwest chapter.
Amanda Paruta (University
at Buffalo (SUNY)
Nina Simone’s singing voice, celebrated as sumptuous, dark, and emotionally potent, amplified the voices of America’s most oppressed, namely Black American women. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Simone performed at dozens of social justice protests and benefits, and regularly advocated for racial and gender equality within the concert hall. She cast a spell on listeners from across racial, gender, and class backgrounds, and her musical performances demonstrated an embodiment of concealed histories and practices from Western European and diasporic African traditions. This fugitive knowledge—knowledge that lingers but remains elusive— served as the foundation of her art, activism, and praxis, as demonstrated by the work of Daphne A Brooks (2021, 2011), Emily J. Lordi (2020, 2016), and Ruth Feldstein (2013). This paper seeks to extend their scholarship into the singing voice, suggesting that her vocal mechanism and expansive timbral capacity was crucial to her role as an entertainer and advocate.
Inspired by Nina Sun Eidsheim’s musicological work on vocal timbre and race, I point to Simone’s voice as a locus of fugitivity. Posing what Eidsheim (2019) names the acousmatic question, the question of who is speaking, reveals a timbre and generic range that confounds Eurocentric definitions of gender and race. She built a praxis of invisibility around an androgynous singing timbre, audible in songs such as “Mississippi Goddam” (1963) and “Four Women,” (1966) which enabled her fluid occupation of several identities and thereby position herself as an ideal conduit for Civil Rights messaging.