Fall Meeting--Abstracts and Bios

 

“The Concept of ‘Crisp’ in Early-Music Performance”

       In a recent article, the author cites the word “crisp” as appearing in over a hundred favorable reviews of early-music performances in major centers, and wonders if musicians are neglecting other sonic possibilities. Judging from these reviewers’ other comments, crisp implies crystal clarity, precise ensemble, and lively tempos. Another aspect of crisp, but never mentioned, might be “metronomic”—often in one tempo from beginning to end. After the metronome’s invention (c.1815), musicians used it sparingly for rhythmic training until some point in the 20^th century when it received universal acceptance for this purpose.  Now all of this is quite bewildering, at least when applied to those who perform under the banner of “historically informed,” because the description of performance in early sources is the opposite extreme of crisp. Ensembles had to be held together by foot stamping, pounding a stout cudgel, or playing the violin with colossal volume. As J. S. Petri declared in 1782, the director should not “so step and stamp that we think ourselves in a paper mill or ironworks.” In 1756, Leopold Mozart noted that even skilled players under-dot, thus rush and finish a passage ahead of time. This paper will therefore focus on the rhythmic and intonation obstacles for early musicians, together with their views on performance. As J. J. Quantz wrote (1752; XI/15): “The performer must seek to enter into the principal feeling (Leidenschaft) and also related ones that are to be expressed. Because one feeling constantly alternates with another in most pieces, the performer must be able to judge the nature of each idea’s feeling, and always adopt it.”

Beverly Jerrold’s recent publications include: Equal Temperament before 1800: The Ear versus Numbers (Brepols), forthcoming. Disinformation in Mass Media: Gluck, Piccinni and the Journal de Paris, RMA Monographs (Routledge, 2021). The Complexities of Early Instrumentation: Winds and Brass (Brepols, 2015). Music Performance Issues: 1600-1900 (Pendragon, 2016). ‘Tempo Fluctuation and Sensibility in Early Music’, Sound Studies Review (Brepols), forthcoming. “The 19 th -century piano and finger-strengthening devices,” The Musical Times 162/1956 (2021): 21-39. “Pascal Boyer: A Pioneer in Journalistic Music Criticism,” Fontes Artis Musicae 65/3 (2018): 146-56. “Quantz and Agricola: A Literary Collaboration,” Acta Musicologica 88 (2016/2): 127-42.

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Formidably Fearsome Females and the Grotesque in Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland

 

Unsuk Chin’s opera Alice in Wonderland, adapted from Lewis Carroll’s novel, is full of enigmas, absurdity, and nonsense. One striking contradiction is the abundant physical and verbal violence despite the apparent fairy-tale context. This is most evident in the portrayals of women characters—Alice, the Queen, and the Cook—who, whether carelessly or enthusiastically, constantly threaten and persecute others around them. Scholars have noted this point as inherent in the original novel, which reflects British imperialist approach to their Victorian colonies. Just as the imperialist perceives the colonial Other as primitive, exotic, and dangerous, the monstrously matriarchal social order of Wonderland is a fantasy of transgression against the ideals of British society and culture.

The paper focuses on this seeming contradiction between the idealized maternal womanhood and the violent matriarchy enacted among the opera’s female characters. For this purpose, I tap into the aesthetic concept of the “grotesque”—meaning a departure from norms, conventions, and familiarity—to illuminate how these formidably fearsome females are made so distinctively daunting in the opera’s libretto. Specifically, I investigate how Chin and her co-librettist, David Henry Hwang, built and intensified the grotesque elements of the female characters, with an emphasis on Scene 2 (Pool of Tears; A Caucus-Race and A Long Tale), Scene 4 (Pig and Pepper), and Scene 6 (The Queen’s Croquet-Ground). This exploration bares the harsh points of the characters’ enigmatic words and actions beyond a simplified social understanding of the children’s book context, thereby adding nuance to the opera’s multiple interpretational layers.

 Ji Yeon Lee is an assistant professor of music theory at the University of Houston. She received her PhD from CUNY Graduate Center. She has published articles and book chapters on Wagner, verismo opera, and Korean composer Unsuk Chin.

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“Entrapped in Darkness”: Musical and Dramatic Representations of Blindness in Tchaikovsky’s Opera Iolanta

 Regardless of directorial approach—that is, whether it is a traditional or a contemporary staging—productions of Tchaikovsky’s last opera Iolanta recreate the cultural myths and stereotypes assigned to blindness. The blind Iolanta is represented either as a sweet, innocent girl, whose blindness desexualizes her and renders her incapable of performing basic tasks, or as a saintly sage, whose blindness confers a wisdom and inner vision beyond that of her unimpaired counterparts, or as a mentally disabled, unstable woman, whose blindness makes her both mad and cognitively impaired. 

Tchaikovsky’s opera, both its libretto and its music, embodies and amplifies these conventional, ableist tropes for the representation of blindness. The opera prescribes these tropes in a literal and unquestioning way, determining thereby ableist stagings of Iolanta. Besides discussing those rather negative patterns of representing blindness, I offer ideas for rereading Iolanta and address certain episodes in the opera from which a counter-narrative and an alternative, more realistic staging of blindness might be developed. 

My discussion is informed by the interdisciplinary approach offered by the subfield of music and disability studies. Most blindness-related work in this subfield has focused on  blind composers and performers. I intend to shift the focus from blind musicians to the musical representations of blindness.

Nafset Chenib is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Nafset’s research interests include intersection between music and disability, particularly representations of blindness in the 19th century opera. She is also an accomplished opera and classical singer whose notable achievements include headlining the 2014 Winter Paralympic Games alongside José Carreras and collaborations with prominent orchestras such as Vladimir Spivakov’s Moscow Virtuosi, Svetlanov State Symphony Orchestra, and Bolshoi Theater's Chamber Orchestra. She has been the first blind performer to sing Iolanta in a staging. She obtained her Master of Music degree, with distinction, from the Moscow’s Victor Popov Academy of Choral Arts, and completed the Professional Studies program in classical voice, also with distinction, at Manhattan School of Music. She is a recipient of the MSM Pablo Casals award for music accomplishment and human endeavor.

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“Musical Russianness” and its Practical Application

Determining what makes Russian music “Russian” may be Russian musicology’s most polemic inquiry. Yet, despite many scholars’ attempts to dislodge its eminence, it remains seminal in the study of the historical, cultural, and sociopolitical aspects of Russian music. To support my position for a wider acceptance of “Russianness” as epistemically important in the analysis of Russian music, I created three theories that reframe how “Russianness” can be methodological used: Development analysis (the historical creation of “Russianness” and its factors) Idiom (via the Frolova-Walker/Rimsky-Korsakov line that “musical Russianness” is simply manufactured devices), and Reception analysis (“Russianness” is but created within a listener’s mind as colored by experiences and ideology). By destabilizing the conventional and unequivocally modern sophistry of “nothing but essentialization,” it is through seeing the term as a dialogically integrated quality, intrinsically connected with its contextual surroundings, that its efficacy becomes evident. It is apparent that any academically valuable analysis of Russian music involves far more than musical considerations, yet it seems Western Russian music scholars are still hesitant to endorse one of the premiere methods available to them, which can provide non-Russian researchers with a historically saturated methodology for the study of the Russian identity and the politics of being Russian is epitomized via the musical arts. While Taruskin and Stravinsky decried the notion, my theories help place Russian music back into its multifactorial timeline, using “Russianness” as an intracontextual method of music analysis which allows greater emphasis to be placed on the aesthetic how and not the what.

 

John David Vandevert is a Graduate student of Musicology at The University of Bristol who recently completed his Masters dissertation entitled, "A Contemporary Analysis of “Musical Russianness” as evidenced in Husky’s Album “Hoshkhonog” (2020)." He is currently a contributing writer for the online publication Opera Wire, and is working towards pursuing a PhD at The University of Manchester, with the plan to study how "Russianness" in Russian hip-hop can be more fully contextualized, with plans to create a "Theory of Hip-Hop Russianness."

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“Everyone but black lung’s done turned him away” a phenomenological and voice-based analysis of “Black Lung” by Hazel Dickens

Sheltered from the cries of the dying, the asking hand too weak to reach out, the blackened lungs scarred by decades of coal dust, the boss man closed the door. Following the death of her eldest brother, Hazel Dickens composed “Black Lung” in 1969, to give him the voice he was refused in life. During the 1960s, West Virginian coal miners and their families fought for the necessity of health and safety regulations as well as fair compensation from the mining companies who sought to delegitimize the disease, inculpate the miners, and ignore their suffering. Listening to Dickens’s hauntingly high belt in “Black Lung,” I am gripped by the movement of the piece and the multivalent sensations of acoustic space. But how does Hazel Dickens’s voice create this unique soundscape that aurally encompasses place? How do we experience the emotionality expressed in the singer’s voice? For me, the sonic effect of her vocality, dialecticism, and ornamentation envelops the listener in a disembodied yet extremely personal space as she confronts the horrors of black lung, and the desperate alienation and dehumanization felt by working-class coal miners. For this presentation, I will be drawing heavily on the analytical practices of Aaron Fox’s investigation of country music and vocality, Steven Feld’s acoustemology, and Victoria Malawey’s analysis of vocal delivery in popular music. The compelling sincerity of Dickens’s grievances, the rage spurred by injustice and neglect, and the urgent demand for social change, I argue are all present in her vocal techniques and emotionality.

Anna Valcour (she/her) is currently a Ph. D. student in Musicology at Brandeis University while simultaneously earning her M.A. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies. She holds a M.M. in Voice with an emphasis in Opera from the University of North Texas, a B.M. in Vocal Performance, and a B.A. in History from Lawrence University. Her research interests include witchcraft and demonology in German Lieder, cultic groups and music, vocal pedagogy, Viennese operetta, voice-based analysis, and fantasy and the occult in music. As a U.S.D.O.E. McNair Scholar, she engaged in extensive historical research culminating in her honors thesis, “The Devil’s Bestial Mirror: an analysis of animal symbolism and its relationship to the discourse of witchcraft and demonological lore in early modern Europe” which was awarded the William F. Raney Prize for “achievement at the highest level in the department, including original research in historical sources” at Lawrence University. She is currently the Project Lead for Connected PhD and is also researching insular plainchant as an assistant under Dr. Karen Desmond. In addition to her scholarly pursuits, Anna is a professional opera singer. She has been a Resident Artist for the Dallas Opera, Toledo Opera, Cedar Rapids Opera, Opera MODO, Ann Arbor Opera, and Main Street Opera. Her repertoire includes Königin der Nacht (Die Zauberflöte), Eurydice (Orphée aux enfers), Mabel (Pirates of Penzance), Olympia (Les contes d’Hoffmann), Valencienne (Die lustige Witwe), and Susanna (Le nozze di Figaro). When not engulfed in her musical pursuits, she enjoys being a Dungeon Master for D&D, cooking, and hiking with her husband.