AMSGNY Meetings


Schedule for May 9, 2026 Meeting at NYU

 

The next meeting of the Greater New York Chapter of the American Musicological Society will be 

Saturday, May 9th.

It will take place at the AMS headquarters at New York University.
20 Cooper Square, Floor 3
New York, NY 10003

The nearest subway stations are Astor Place (#6 train) and 8th Street (R train).

Here's the line up:

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)




You must sign up ahead of time, for security reasons. There is no cost, so sign up.  Here is the link:  

Abstracts and bios for Spring 2026 meeting

 

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

 

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.

 

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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.

 ***

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.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 




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