Winter Meeting—January 22, 2022 Via Zoom. All are welcome to
attend.
The Zoom code is https://zoom.us/j/9453643107
2 – 3 PM Ethnic
Identities
Representation of Second-Generation Latin Americans in
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Music.
Leanny Muñoz (University of California, Davis)
Danielle Roman (New York University)
3-3:15 Break
3:15-4:15 Popular
Music Studies
Husky’s usage of the Bhairavi Scale and the Cathodic
Harmonium: Where East meets West meets Rap
John David Vandevert (The University of Bristol, UK)
"The Angel of Doubt": Ancient Wisdom Poetry in the
Music of the Punch Brothers
Hannah Porter Denecke (Florida State University)
4:15-4:30 Break
4:30-5:30 Music
from the British Isles
“Haydn’s Symphonies Scored by Clementi.” A New Source
of the London Symphonies.
Luca Lévi Sala (Manhattan College)
Under the Kilt: The Pipe Band as a Tool of Cultural Transmission
Erin Walker Bliss (University of Kentucky)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Leanny Muñoz (University of California, Davis)
In this paper, I will discuss
how Encanto and other
musical works by Lin-Manuel Miranda point to a growing representation of
second-generation Latin American identities in the U.S. Additionally, I will
explore how Miranda’s compositions typically differentiate between generations
via music. For example, the first-generation of family members have songs that
feature vallenato, cumbia, and salsa, but Mirabel, her sisters, and their
cousins, second-generation citizens of the town of ENcanto, heavily incorporate
popular hip hop and pop musical styles found in current popular music.
Furthermore, much of Miranda’s lyrical and narrative contributions address the
anxieties and concerns of second-generation Latin Americans in the U.S. such as
the crushing weight of expectations placed on older sisters in Latin American
families, which I will read as representing the pressure to succeed in the U.S.
while retaining tradition, as addressed in the song “Surface Pressure.”
Leanny Muñoz received her Master of Music from
Louisiana State University. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts
with a concentration in Fine and Performing Arts and a minor in Music
Performance at the Louisiana Scholars’ College at Northwestern State University
of Louisiana. Her primary research interests are in late nineteenth-century and
early twentieth-century Spanish and Latin American music, especially as related
to nationalism, representations of race and gender, and other socio-political
issues. Additionally, Leanny is interested in film music, the
discourse of colonialism in music and the classroom, arts administration, and
remaining an active vocalist.
“There’s a Little Bit of Irish in Sadie Cohn”: Irish-Jewish
Partnerships in Early-Twentieth Century American Popular Culture
Danielle Roman (New York University)
Alfred Bryan and Jack Stern’s 1916
Tin Pan Alley hit “There’s a Little Bit of Irish in Sadie Cohn” follows a
pattern emerging in this decade: depictions of intermarriage and romantic
entanglement between Irish and Jewish characters in music and drama, often
written by Irish-Jewish composer-lyricist collaborations. As these ethnic
groups became fixtures in the popular music and theater scene in New York,
cross-cultural interactions and misinterpretations were common tropes in
popular song and on the stage. Songs like “It’s Tough When Izzy Rosenstein
Loves Genevieve Malone” (1910) and “Yiddisha Luck and Irisha Love” (1911)
explore contemporary anxieties surrounding intermarriage, race, and
minoritarian status in American society. Following these songs’ successes,
vaudeville and early musical theater Irish-Jewish collaborations such as those
between Ned Harrigan and David Braham; George M. Cohan and Sam Harris; and
George Burns and Gracie Allen played an integral role in defining American life
on the popular stage. The celebratory idiom is most salient in Anne Nichols’
1923 play Abie’s Irish Rose, which
portrays the marriage of Abraham Levy and Rosemary Murphy, and the various
prejudices they must overcome on the part of their communities. The immensely
popular play, which was severely panned by critics, was turned into a novel
(1927) and a movie (1928). It also spawned the successful film series The
Cohens and the Kellys. However, this positive depiction of Irish-Jewish
connection was particularly disparaged in the Irish and Jewish press, who felt
their communities were being misunderstood and misrepresented on stage,
regardless of the play’s good intent. Indeed, despite the partnerships
displayed in popular culture of this period, ethnic newspapers paint a
different story--one of continued underlying mistrust between these groups. In
this paper, I attend to the nuances of this phenomenon in the site-specific
context of New York in order to investigate negotiations of community in the
quest for cultural assimilation.
Danielle Roman is a second-year PhD student at New York
University researching Irish diasporic musical networks and cross-Celtic
relations. She obtained her Master of Philosophy degree from the University of
Cambridge in 2020.
Husky’s usage of the Bhairavi Scale and the Cathodic
Harmonium: Where East meets West meets Rap
John David Vandevert (The University of Bristol, UK)
The legacy of The Mighty Five in
the development of the “Russian” musical identity is unarguable. But what seems
to be missing is the contemporary connection that binds the Russian 21st
century and its musical thumbprint to the indelible influence of the 19th
century “New Russian School” and their devotion to their fellow compatriot,
realizing a national identity through musical means, and the (far) Eastern
invocations of romanticized, Slavophile chimeras. Given, for the sake of
abstraction, that the musical ecosphere of the post-post-Soviet, Russian epoch
is no longer solely shaped by the proscriptive tastes of authoritarian
strictures, intelligentic aesthetic codes, or top-down ideological shaping,
“popular music” proclivities in Russia have largely Westernized and quickly
assimilated into the rank-and-file of the “globalized hegemony of market
capitalism.” And yet, despite the post-Soviet
scramble for Western cultural decadence in the 90s and early-mid 2000s,
followed by the return to cogency following Medvedev and further awakening
following the return of Putinian entrapment in the early 2010s, the influence
of Kuchkist discourses are now a sociocultural staple and a calling-card of
neo-Eurasianist dialectics. This is no more apparent than in one of the
foremost preferred genres as of 2020, that being Russian Hip-Hop, seconded
unsurprisingly to the folk song genre1. In my ongoing investigation into the
presence of musical “Russianness” in Russian Hip-Hop’s rather cosmopolitanized
but epochally apposite “intonational dictionary,” I seek to defend my deduction
that this highly provocative genre has come to fully embody not only the
Kuchkist proclivities of Exotic fascinations and self-imposed cultural
antiquarianism, but the Belyayev Circle’s modalities of appropriative
Westernism and tactful modernism. Using the song and music video “Revenge” by
Buryatian rapper Husky as the lynchpin, the argument for expanding our
understanding of the Kuchkist influence on contemporary Russian music will be
explicated.
John David Vandevert is a postgraduate candidate in
Musicology at The University of Bristol, where he is studying Russian Hip-Hop's
role in contemporizing the long-standing question of Russian Nationalism and
the enigmatic construction of "narodnost," with a focus on how its
musical identity has adopted the dialectic predilections of 18th and 19th
century discourses.
"The Angel of Doubt": Ancient Wisdom Poetry in the
Music of the Punch Brothers
Hannah Porter Denecke (Florida State University)
Since winning “Best Folk Album” for
All Ashore at the 2018 Grammys, the Brooklyn-based Punch Brothers have
established themselves as a significant cultural influence in North America.
Much of this album features political critique, yet it also includes personal
vignettes related to family and parenthood. “The Angel of Doubt” is a unique
track on the album, however. The piece itself is in an odd meter, often resulting
in rhythmic units of seven or thirteen. This tension creates an unsettling
backdrop for the dialogue between the narrator and a metaphorical antagonist
who haunts him: the Angel of Doubt. Strikingly, the narrator resists the Angel
of Doubt using quotations from the book of Ecclesiastes. This paper explores
the interplay between the wisdom of Ecclesiastes and the Punch Brothers’ “The
Angel of Doubt.”
At first listen, the song seems
merely to chronicle the distress of a musician haunted by doubt in the late
evening hours. The narrator himself seems to struggle with memories of his
past, reminded that he used to spend his time “striving after wind,” and
recollecting the feeling that “everything was meaningless.” The Angel of Doubt
responds in rap-like spoken word, this character a metaphor for the doubt
within the narrator’s own mind. Philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
provide a useful framework for understanding complex literary metaphors in
their Metaphors We Live By (1980). Jewish wisdom literature scholar
Michael V. Fox’s commentary provides framework for understanding the poetry and
metaphors specific to Ecclesiastes. For the Punch Brothers, this wisdom poetry
spoke into the tension they felt with contemporary politics during the Trump
administration period. Today, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to create global
restlessness and malaise among musicians and artists everywhere. Indeed, there
is no better time to ponder the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, as expressed in “The
Angel of Doubt.”
Hannah Porter Denecke is a doctoral candidate at
Florida State University. Her musicological interests focus on the ways that
cultural factors are performed and understood in American music. She wrote her
undergraduate honors thesis on the fin-de-siècle parlor music composer Carrie
Jacobs-Bond, and her master’s thesis on the theological undertones of Vincent
Persichetti’s 1970 inter-religious piece The Creation. Hannah’s
interests are varied, but she finds coherence in their connection to North American
publ
“Haydn’s Symphonies Scored by Clementi.” A New Source
of the London Symphonies.
Luca Lévi Sala (Manhattan College)
Haydn’s twelve London Symphonies
were composed between 1791 and 1795 and broadly and regularly performed during
the Professional Concerts and the Salomon private series at Hanover Square in
London. Arrangements of these symphonies were later published largely for
different kinds of musical forces. Adaptations for keyboard, violin and
violoncello of the first set of six of them were initially issued by Johan
Peter Salomon—entered at Stationers’ Hall in 1796. The second set, entered at
Stationers’ Hall registers was to come in 1797 and “printed for Mr Salomon
the Proprietor.”
Only almost twenty years later, between around 1813 and 1816
Clementi & Co. (Clementi, Banger, Collard, Davis &
Collard) published the first edition of Muzio Clementi’s adaptations
of Haydn’s twelve London Symphonies. On 30 July 1813, the Morning
Post advertised the first three arrangements of “Haydn’s Celebrated
Symphonies Composed & Performed at M.r Salomon’s […]” for
pianoforte, flute, violin and cello: the first one, the so-called ‘London’
symphony no. 104, alongside the appearance of the nos. 94 and 100, that is “the
Surprise Symphony […] and the Military Symphony […].”
New evidence about Clementi’s
preparation of these works might be revealed by a recently located autograph
source, bearing the transcription of the whole set of the full scores of
Haydn’s London Symphonies: “Haydn’s | Symphonies | scored by | Clementi” (no
RISM, I-BGi, Fondo Piatti-Lochis, PREIS.H1.8764). An extensive and detailed
codicological analysis of the two volumes constituting the source reveals new
interesting evidence about its genesis, alongside adding further information
about Clementi’s autographs, of which very little is known to date.
This source proves also useful in enlightening additional
details about Clementi’s interest in studying, performing and arranging Haydn’s
works, adding more information to the extensive literature about the Austrian
composer and the history of the performance practice at the early XIX-Century.
Luca Lévi Sala PhD is Adjunct Assistant Professor at
Manhattan College (NYC) and Visiting Scholar at New York University. He was
Visiting Teaching Professor at Jagiellonian University in Cracow (2021) and at
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (2020-2021), former Professeur
associé at Université de Montréal (2017-2020), Visiting Researcher at
New York University (2017) and Visiting Research Fellow at Yale University
(2015-2016). He has published a range of articles and chapters, reviews and
reports (serving as peer-reviewer as well) in various international books and
refereed journals, including Early
Music, Journal of Musicological Research, Notes, Revue de
musicologie, Studi musicali, Journal of Jewish
Identities, Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, Ad Parnassum
Journal, Studia Chopinowskie, Musica
Jagellonica, Eighteenth-Century Music, Analecta
Musicologica, Oxford Bibliographies Online, MGG, Grove Music
Online. His book Music and
Politics in the Italian Fascist State in the 1930s: The View from the Press is
committed to be published with Boydell & Brewer (Suffolk, UK).
Under the Kilt: The Pipe Band as a Tool of Cultural
Transmission
Erin Walker Bliss (University of Kentucky)
For Scots and non‐Scots
alike, the sounds of the bagpipes and the pipe band serve as a cultural
metaphor for Scottish identity, conjuring the material culture and
romantic imagery of the kilted Highlander. Beginning in the 19th century,
this nearly global association appears to have been constructed on a
series of transformations of cultural practices throughout greater Britain
and the lands of the Scottish diaspora, as the pipe band moved from
military spheres to serve a range of civic and social purposes
within Scotland. The ensemble’s appeal was rendered greater by the ideas
of "tartanization" and "Celticism" that
flourished during this period. These concepts were fueled by the
romanticization of the Highlander in British literature, Queen
Victoria's affinity for summer holidays at Balmoral, and the formation of
Scottish and Celtic heritage societies embracing Highland dress,
music, and sport. The primary goal of this paper will be to study the role
of the pipe band in the construction and transformation of
Scottish identity through an examination of the meanings, values, and
musical practices that are built into ideas of "Scottishness,"
or, more generally, "Celticness," from the mid‐19th
century through the present in the British Isles and North America.
Touching on field research conducted with two regional pipe bands,
Kentucky United Pipes & Drums and Knoxville Pipes & Drums, it
will also raise far‐reaching questions concerning the nature of group
and individual identity, as well as the ways in which identity
functions and is recognized within and outside a particular
cultural group.
Erin Walker Bliss is a full-time lecturer in World
Music at the University of Kentucky. She holds both a DMA in
Percussion Performance and a PhD in Musicology/ Ethnomusicology, and
is a founding member of nief-norf, a contemporary music ensemble. Erin is
also the Executive Director of the Central Music Academy, a non-profit
music program that gives free private music lessons to kids who face
financial barriers.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.