Schedule for May 9, 2026 Meeting at NYU
0 Comments Published by AMSGNY President on Monday, April 27, 2026 at 3:45 PM.
Session 1 12 noon to 1:30 PM
“Every Day We’re Grilled on an Iron Plate”: The Peculiar Success of “Oyoge! Taiyaki-kun”
Tristan Wilson (The New School)
From Tradition to the Concert Stage: Virtuosity and Pianistic Nationalism in Ananda Sukarlan’s Rapsodia Nusantara
Edy Rapika Panjaitan (Ohio University)
Algorithm Panic and the Adverse Geoblocking of Chinese Funeral Brass Band Videos on Douyin amid US Restrictions
Joseph S. Kaminski (College of Staten Island)
Break 1:30 to 2 PM
Business Meeting 2 to 2:15 PM
Session 2 2:15 to 4 PM
Genealogies of Korean Virtuosity: Politics and Global Circulation
MyungJin Oh (Rutgers University)
Talking about Sound: Conversation as a Tool for Timbre
Juliet Pascal Glazer (Boston College)
Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘Nationalistic Prose’ and His Misinterpreted Early Operas
Carol Kitzes Baron (SUNY Stonybrook)
Abstracts and Biographies
“Every Day We’re Grilled on an Iron Plate”: The Peculiar Success of “Oyoge!
Taiyaki-kun”
Tristan Wilson (The New School)
In December 1975, the song “Oyoge! Taiyaki-kun”
(“Swim! Fish-Shaped Cake Boy”) became the first single to debut at number one
on the Oricon Singles Chart, and eventually sold over 4.5 million copies,
making it the best-selling physical single in Japanese history. This is even
more remarkable for a “gloomily allegorical” insert song (Drexler 2024)
initially written for Hirake! Ponkikki, a children’s television program
comparable to Sesame Street.
In this paper, I propose that the unprecedented
success of “Oyoge! Taiyaki-kun” resulted from its dual function: as a
children’s song and a leftist, anti-corporate statement. Indeed, an article in
the widely circulated newspaper Mainichi Shimbun described the song
as “[appealing] to adults’ desire to set themselves free from the life of a
white-collar worker” (“Taiyaki-kun rikieichū” 1976; translation mine). This
strongly suggests an identification of the titular taiyaki (fish-shaped
cake) with the working class, an idea which I will explicate through analysis.
I argue that the song’s subversive undertone distinguishes it from typical
children’s songs—the music’s formal aberrances and use of the minor mode,
alongside the singer’s crooner-like performance, reinforce a reading of the
lyrics as a complaint about aggressive workplace practices.
Despite being neglected by existing scholarship, the
unprecedented success of “Oyoge! Taiyaki-kun” made it a landmark song in
Japanese music history. Incorporating James C. Scott’s idea of hidden
transcripts, this paper will reveal how the song resonated with left-wing
viewpoints, and offer a blueprint for coding political messaging into popular
culture.
Biography:
Tristan
Wilson is a composer, violist, and musicologist from Detroit, Michigan. As a
musicologist, his work focuses on intersections between gender, sexuality, and
class in Japanese popular music of the 1950s through the 1980s. He holds a
Bachelor of Music from the Cleveland Institute of Music, and is currently
pursuing a Master of Music at The New School's Mannes School of Music.
From Tradition to the Concert
Stage: Virtuosity and Pianistic Nationalism in Ananda Sukarlan’s Rapsodia
Nusantara
Edy Rapika Panjaitan (Ohio University)
Ananda Sukarlan
is recognized as one of Indonesia’s most influential pianist-composers, whose
contributions have significantly shaped contemporary classical music and music
education both nationally and internationally. Among his most important works
is the complete set of Rapsodia Nusantara, a collection of 44 piano
compositions that demonstrate a remarkable synthesis of Indonesian musical
idioms and Western classical traditions.
This study examines the
Rapsodia Nusantara as a whole, with particular attention to its virtuosic and
artistic technical demands. I argue that Rapsodia Nusantara represents a form
of pianistic nationalism in which virtuosic technique and compositional design
function as aesthetic strategies to transform Indonesian musical repertoire
into a global classical piano literature. By analyzing how traditional
Indonesian musical elements are transformed within a Western pianistic
framework, this study highlights the composer’s ability to construct a unique
musical identity that is both culturally rooted and globally resonant. The
research focuses on Sukarlan’s aesthetic approach, exploring both the pianistic
techniques and the compositional dimensions that define the cycle.
Through a critical and
interpretive lens, this thesis aims to deepen understanding of Indonesian
classical repertoire while offering insights into Sukarlan’s compositional
artistry. It further proposes an interpretive framework that may serve
pianists, composers, and educators in approaching this significant work.
Bio:
Edy R.
Panjaitan is a pianist, composer, and scholar.
He 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 Sumatra, Indonesia.
Algorithm Panic and the Adverse
Geoblocking of Chinese Funeral Brass Band Videos on Douyin amid US Restrictions
Joseph S. Kaminski (College
of Staten Island)
Westernization brought marching
brass bands into mainstream Chinese culture on the mainland and through the
diaspora. Bands are common now and used at funerals, hired to perform sorrowful
and military music. Outsiders’ unknowingness about Chinese funeral marching
bands is because the Douyin short-video app is restricted to users with Chinese
phone numbers. US phones prevent its download, geoblocking it. In
2026, TikTok, the American version, was finally sold to a new conglomerate of
mainly American investors for fear of data harvesting of American users. This
is not a concern of the presenter since few Chinese brass band videos even
appear on American TikTok. Douyin’s commercialism in China is in algorithms
targeting mainland Chinese users such as through funeral brass band advertising
and algorithms around brass band cultural marketing. This is not a threat to US
users at all since it is not in their cultural interests. US officials though
fear Chinese algorithms of “techno nationalism” and “soft power,” bringing
Chinese culture to the American public. The result is that Douyin’s marching
funeral band videos are inaccessible in the US, with all of Douyin. Hundreds of
videos of bands marching around courtyards and up and down village streets
appear on Douyin daily. Bands were introduced to China in the
nineteenth-century by foreign powers and performed at funerals during the late
Qing Dynasty. These marching bands remain recondite in the West and often are
misperceived as dislocations in an altered realm, or a backward aspect of an
aspiring modern culture, both etic perceptions of Sino-Orientalists. Disregard
comes despite their modern commonality with bands around the world. The
presenter traveled to cities in China to observe and document performing
marching funeral bands, comparing and contrasting them to bands in New York’s
Chinatown with whom he performs. New York Chinatown musicians have Douyin, and
so does the presenter, in a phone purchased in China with a China mobile
account. Videos collected from Douyin depict widespread semi-amateur band
cultures of mainland townspeople integrated with the community, as in New
York’s extended community.
Bio:
Joseph
S. Kaminski is Assistant Adjunct Professor of World Music in the Department of
Performing and Creative Arts of the College of Staten Island of the City
University of New York.
Talking about Sound: Conversation
as a Tool for Timbre
Juliet Pascal Glazer (Boston
College)
Music scholars who research
communication about tone or timbre tend to focus on lexical semantics. Timbre
lexicons often include cross-modal metaphors such as “warm” “metallic,” and
“clean” (Fritz et al 2012; Harkness 2017; 2013). Scholars note that these
lexicons pose problems of vagueness (Barthes 1978; Dudley 2014). For example,
“metallic” may refer to a range of timbres, and one person’s notion of a
“metallic” sound may not match another’s. I demonstrate an alternative approach
to analyzing timbre by listening beyond lexical semantics (Carruthers 2023).
Instead, I follow ethnographers of recording studios (Porcello 1994; Meintjes
2003) to observe how people communicate about timbre in practice through
extended conversations and non-linguistic interactions. I examine strategies
used by New York City and Boston-based violin repairers (also called luthiers)
when they collaborate with violinists to alter instrumental acoustics during
“sound adjustment sessions.” Such sessions are opportunities for luthiers to
physically adjust violins to improve their timbres. Luthiers begin by eliciting
musicians’ descriptions of desired timbres, then work to make them sensorially
real through an iterative and improvisational practice of testing, listening,
talking, and adjusting. I build on Porcello’s typology of metapragmatic
strategies for talking about sound (2004; 1994) to show that luthiers co-create
violin sound with musicians through strategies for communicating about timbre
that unfold not only through lexical semantics, but also through
metapragmatics.
Bio
Dr.
Juliet Pascal Glazer recently completed a joint Ph.D. in Music and Anthropology
at the University of Pennsylvania. She currently lives in Boston, where she
teaches in Boston College’s Messina College Associate’s Degree program. Her
interdisciplinary research investigates acoustic technologies, value, sensory
experience, and communication. Her dissertation, “Senses of Value: Sound
and Circulation in Violin Crafting Communities,” is a multi-sited ethnography
of violin makers and repairers in New York City, in Boston, and in Cremona,
Italy. The paper she is giving today is adapted from Chapter Five of the
dissertation. She is moving back home to New York City in June and looks forward
to getting to know members of the NYC music studies community.
Genealogies of Korean Virtuosity:
Politics and Global Circulation
MyungJin Oh (Rutgers University)
“I know in Korea they don’t sing,” “It’s almost too perfect,” and “Violin is
not a machine,” remarks made by Pinchas Zukerman during a master class at the
Juilliard School in 2021, circulate within a broader Orientalist discourse.
These statements reproduce long-standing racialized assumptions that position
Asian musicians as technically precise yet expressively deficient: their
performances are perceived as overly perfect, insufficiently human, and
ultimately “machine-like.” This logic extends beyond Western classical music
into global popular culture. Discourses surrounding K-pop, for instance,
frequently frame performers as “manufactured” and mechanized, reinforcing
similar tropes about perfection, embodiment, and authenticity. Such narratives
are best understood not as isolated instances of bias, but as symptoms of a
historically and transculturally constructed discourse of virtuosity, in which
technical perfection is treated as mechanical, bodily skill as suspect, and
some performers as less expressive, thus less fully human.
This paper traces the genealogy of Korean contemporary virtuosity, following
its formation from European discourses on instrumental virtuosity to its
transformation within Asian institutional frameworks. It examines Korean
training systems and competition culture as key sites where virtuosity is
produced, circulated, and evaluated. Focusing on the political dynamics of
aesthetic hierarchies of taste, I argue that Korean virtuosity participates
in reshaping the sociocultural stratification in the global contexts.
In doing so, the virtuosic achievements of Asian musicians reveal and challenge
Western hegemonic aesthetic authority, exposing the unequal structures of
valuation shaped by colonial histories and modernizing discourses.
Bio:
MyungJin
Oh is a Lecturer in Musicology at Rutgers University. She holds a PhD in
Musicology and a DMA in Piano Performance from Rutgers. Her dissertation, Timbre
in Chopin’s Parisian Piano Music, 1830s–1840s, examines timbral phenomenology
and aesthetics through organological, technological, and practice-based
approaches. From 2023 to 2025, she served as an Editorial Assistant for reviews
at the Journal of the American Musicological Society, where she also
published a review of Deirdre Loughridge’s Sounding Human: Music and
Machines, 1740–2020. Her article, “Object Lesson: The Personified Voice of
Chopin’s Last Pleyel Piano,” is forthcoming in Nineteenth-Century Music.
Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘Nationalistic
Prose’ and His Misinterpreted Early Operas
Carol Kitzes Baron (SUNY Stonybrook)
In recent years, German Jews
working in the field of art music have been associated with political
conservatism and nationalism, and with articulating xenophobic ideas stemming
from loyalty to, typically, homogeneous European ethnic nations. Positive responses
to authoritarian political structures by German-Jews may be beyond the
comprehension of most Americans, but they are particularly abhorrent to
American Jews whose ancestry was Russian.
The loss of a shared Jewish
identity after the First World War has contributed to the misinterpretations of
Arnold Schoenberg’s paired early operas Die glückliche Hand and Erwartung.
Music scholarship and criticism have associated them with “German
Expressionism,” “The Woman’s Problem,” “Male Castration Complex,” etc. Richard
Taruskin, an American Jew of Russian descent with a Marxist orientation -- and
the most prolific, prestigious, and honored musicologist and music critic of
our time -- has both dismissed Schoenberg’s work and obsessed about it.
The referential sources for
Schoenberg’s librettos, one written by the composer and the other by the
medical doctor Marie Pappenheim, are actually from the Tanach (the Hebrew
Bible), a Jewish mystical text (the Zohar), and modern Jewish history. They have
eluded scholars sensitive, particularly, to Schoenberg’s conversion to
Lutheranism. The sole singing roles in each opera are, respectively, “The
Scapegoat” and “The Shekhinah” (the feminine manifestation of the
Divine).
Bio: Carol Kitzes Baron is an
Affiliated Scholar in the Music Department of Stony Brook University, where she
was Executive Director of the Bach Aria Festival and Institute. Her
articles have appeared in leading musicological journals. The University
of Rochester Press published Bach's Changing World: Voices in the
Community. Among her awards are the Sloan Urban Dissertation Fellowship,
major grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two A.S.C.A.P, Deems
Taylor Awards for articles entitled "Dating the Music of Charles
Ives:Facts and Fictions" (1991) and "Varese's Explication of
Debussy's Syrinx in Density 21.5 and An Analysis of
Varese's Composition: A Secret Model Revealed" (1984). Her forthcoming
book is entitled Operas to Save A People: Arnold Schoenberg's
"Die gluckliche Hand" and "Erwartung."
Winter Meeting--February 7, 2026 ONLINE
0 Comments Published by AMSGNY President on Monday, January 5, 2026 at 5:20 PM.
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
***
“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.
***
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.
***
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.
Compositional “Translation” in Unsuk Chin’s Operascope (2023), Subito
con forza (2020), and Frontispiece (2019)
Ji Yeon Lee
(University of Houston)
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.
Bio: Ji Yeon Lee
is an Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Houston. She
earned her Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on
nineteenth-century opera, climax and highpoint, and East Asian composers.
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.