Musicology - Events

Fall

17 SEPTEMBER 2009

Deborah Wong, University of California Riversid
"Don't Fence Me In: Popular Music Studies and Neoliberalism"

Was "Don't Fence Me In" played in the Japanese American internment camps, or wasn't it? Some say that Nisei swing musicians refused to play it; others say it was played in protest-that bands would point their speakers out the windows at the guards. Competing accounts push up against the contemporary need for resistance. I address the ways that this popular swing tune is remembered and how memory makes the song do certain kinds of work. The tune 'spoke' to the borders and boundaries enforced by internment and continues to speak to Japanese Americans who insist on memory and search for signs of confrontation. Played in commemorative rituals, the song points to Japanese American performative readings of history and reconstructed places within it, in dialogue with post-9/11 responses to civil rights violations.

I argue that internment (non)performances of "Don't Fence Me In" are subject to the "productive uncertainty" that Jonathan Sterne locates in his virtuosic examination of Osama bin Laden's recorded voice. No recordings of Nisei internment bands exist yet reiterations and recreations abound, resulting in a kind of "forensic audio" (as Sterne calls it) despite an absent original. I put this up against post-race theory to show that neoliberal notions of free choice and self-realization drive the need for the anecdotes, the absent artifact, and the recreations. The "model neoliberal citizen" works within the quotidian realities of everyday life to eke out individual identity, and post-reparations attempts to map choice back onto Nisei swing musicians is inevitably interpellated with a neoliberal re-reading of race and minoritarian position. Thus the Nisei engagement with mainstream American popular culture rehabilitates race, mainstream 'American' music, and Japanese American resistance even as it speaks to certain master narratives within popular music studies.

29 OCTOBER 2009

R. Larry Todd, Duke University
Fanny Hensel, the OtherMendelssohn

R. Larry Todd has just completed a new biography of Fanny Hensel for Oxford University Press, titled Fanny Hensel, the Other Mendelssohn. Granddaughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Fanny Hensel (1805-1847) was an extraordinary musician who left well over four hundred compositions, most of which fell into oblivion until their rediscovery late in the twentieth century. In his book, R. Larry Todd offers a compelling, authoritative account of Hensel's life and music, and her struggle to emerge as a publicly recognized composer. His talk will explore themes from the book, including the nature of Fanny's musical exchanges with Felix.

5 NOVEMBER 2009

AMS Preview I:

Ralph Locke
"Restoring Lost Meanings in Musical Representations of Exotic 'Others'"

Western art music abounds in works that evoke an exotic locale or culture.  But, with the passing years and the fading of cultural memory, any work tends to lose its connection to the contexts and accepted images that shaped it. Two types of contexts—(1) musical and (2) extramusical—can help recover lost meanings of an exotic work.

 1.  A given exotic work often relies upon a listener’s familiarity with well-established musical signifiers of Otherness.  Prior exotic pieces that are particularly relevant to the work in question can help us listen with something closer to a “period ear.”

2.  Many exotic works specify their intended locale through a title or program, or (in stage works) through sets and costumes.  Yet exotic portrayals in music—e.g., symphonic poems or ballets—are often performed and disseminated with no reference to these basic clues.

The second half of my paper examines in detail the exotic resonances of important passages from two major ballet scores of 1911-13:

• In Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, exotic meanings can be made more specific in regard to the war dance of the (North African, I argue) pirates.
• In Stravinsky’s Petrushka, moments associated with the Moor and with the Asian Magician have gone unnoticed or else have been misconstrued by critics and scholars.  Danced performances also have mangled crucial dramatic details.

Evidence to be considered regarding the intended exotic overtones in both ballets includes (in accord with point 1 above) closely comparable musical features from six exotic works as well as (point 2) the original stagings and sets.

Cristina Fava
The Downfall of the Composers' Collective: Musical or Political Fiasco?"

The search for an American identity in music that characterized the years of the Great Depression coincided with the end of the “roaring twenties” and its jazz age, and with a widespread demand for a music that could instill and sustain faith in a brighter future. Some composers tried to build this new national image by seeking inspiration in the mythology of the American West. Less well known today, a group of young artists of leftist persuasion living in New York – including among others Charles Seeger, Elie Siegmeister, Earl Robinson, Lan Adomian, Marc Blitzstein, Norman Cazden, and Henry Leland Clarke – sought inspiration in the political value of music. An increased interest in radical politics and the growing importance of the labor movement throughout the 1930s characterized their turn to the left, encouraging them to pursue the development of an art music that would be free of many of the (perceived) constraints of European traditions. Under the sway of the Communist Party, they envisioned proletarian music as an emerging musical style comparable to Classicism or Romanticism. Looking for a musical language that could communicate with the masses and give voice to their needs, they aimed to establish an “American proletarian music.”

Two inherent problems, one aesthetic and the other political, prevented the radical movement from reaching its objectives. The compositional modernist path previously pursued by most of its members, clashed with the goals of a “proletarian composer” who would have to utilize a simpler language to connect with the working class and meet the needs of its performers and listeners. My paper addresses this dichotomy through the analysis of some striking examples of the “new” musical style included in two Workers Song Books, compiled by the Composers’ Collective and published by the Workers Music League in 1934 and 1935. But equally accountable for the demise of proletarian music is the Communist Party that, following the new directives of the Popular Front, in 1935 abandoned the promotion of music as a weapon in the class struggle. The analysis of articles and editorials published in the years 1934-35 in the Daily Worker shows that without political support the dream of an American proletarian musical style, of a musical language that could communicate with wide audiences and give voice to their needs, vanished.

In conclusion, I demonstrate that, in their attempt at embracing proletarian music, these composers proved unable to divest themselves of a degree of intellectual and aesthetic elitism. Nonetheless, they were able to create a distinctive moment in American music history and, even if their trajectory was as ephemeral as the tail of a comet, it offers a unique perspective on the intersection between musical, political and social life during the Great Depression. Ultimately, they contributed in their own way, and as substantially as the ultra-modernists, the neo-romantics, and the cowboy-style Americanists to the kaleidoscopic musical world of the 1930s in New York City.

6 NOVEMBER 2009

AMS Preview II:

Holly Watkins: "The Horticultural Aesthetics of Schumann's Blumenstück, op. 19"

Discussions of Robert Schumann’s little-known Blumenstück (Flower-Piece), a short piano work published in 1839, typically begin with apologies. Composed during Schumann’s brief tenure in Vienna, the piece exhibits an accessible style perhaps geared to quick (and much-needed) sales. Suspicion of Blumenstück begins with Schumann himself; in various letters, he referred to the piece as “not very significant” and “delicate—for ladies.” Recent writers, while recognizing that Blumenstück is hardly simple, tend to echo Schumann’s judgments: Anthony Newcomb classes the piece as “a higher level of salon music”; John Daverio observes that the title inspires low expectations; and Erika Reiman, even after a revealing analysis, concludes that the work has “no pretensions to grandeur.”

Schumann’s apparent targeting of “ladies” as the consumers of Blumenstück helps to explain the discomfort stemming from its gendered title. Besides the long-standing trope of woman as flower, the title refers to flower-painting: in a letter to Clara from Vienna, Robert mentioned a number of small pieces he intended to name “‘little Blumenstücke,’ like one calls pictures.” By the nineteenth century, flower-painting was a genre almost exclusively associated with women and, hence, little esteemed. Yet despite its domestic connotations, the flower also serves as a gateway to the metaphysical in Romantic discourse. Jean Paul’s Vorschule der Ästhetik, for example, compares the flower’s marriage of matter and spirit to that of metaphor. The dreaming artist in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale Ritter Gluck listens to flowers singing in a valley, while the love-struck poet of Heinrich Heine’s Dichterliebe (set by Schumann in 1840) hears flowers speaking in the garden. In an especially glowing review published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Schumann equated music, the “speech of flowers,” and the “speech of the soul.” How can we square the lofty poetics of the flower with the abject domesticity of artistic and musical “flower-pieces”?

This paper argues that the interplay between textural and melodic simplicity and formal inventiveness in Blumenstück—an example of the “dialectic of triviality and sublimity” Daverio finds in much of Schumann’s music—gives voice to the dual trope of the flower in German Romantic culture. Wild and cultivated, feminine and masculine, natural and artificial, Blumenstück destabilizes familiar aesthetic categories. In response, I propose to outline an aesthetics of intermediacy inspired by horticulture, an aesthetics that celebrates the hybrid and the cultivar. Blumenstück’s altered rondo form, in which tonal center and refrain are initially at odds, blurs the status of origins and organic development, bringing to mind the paradox Paul de Man locates in the Romantic desire for art to “originate like flowers” (Hölderlin). Natural objects like the flower possess an “intrinsic ontological primacy” in Romantic thought, argues de Man, yet the Romantic creator cannot access that transcendence: artworks must originate anew every time. Using this paradox to challenge organicism, I offer a horticultural model of understanding Schumann’s quasi-organic approach to form, his generic experiments, and music at home in either salon or imaginary museum.

Lisa Jakelski, "The Economics of St. Luke"

Huge and excited crowds greeted Polish performances of Krzysztof Penderecki’s St. Luke Passion in 1966. Western observers on the scene were quick to read the large audience turnout as a function of the work’s unambiguously sacred text, a habit that has persisted in more recent musicological accounts of the St. Luke Passion and its impact in socialist-era Poland. Yet the story of this piece challenges conventional cold war wisdom that views Polish religiosity as a simple analogue to political resistance. For whatever headaches the Passion’s content may have caused in closed government circles, presentations of Penderecki’s new work took place well within the purview of official cultural life, during a period otherwise marked by religious repression.

The reception of the St. Luke Passion in Poland, I suggest, cannot be understood apart from the competing contexts of religion, politics, post-war aesthetics, and economics first activated at its West German world premiere in early 1966. Relying on journalism, archival documentation, and score analysis, this paper follows the St. Luke Passion from West Germany to its presentation at the 1966 Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music. West German press accounts record the work’s almost immediate politicization, a distraction from the St. Luke Passion’s religious dimension that eased its entry into socialist Poland. For Polish critics, the work’s fusion of chant, tonality, serialism, and the shrieking timbres of early-1960s Polish sonorism rationalized Penderecki’s earlier avant-garde techniques, a legitimizing power that extended to the musical institutions responsible for launching his international compositional career in the first place.

Most importantly, however, I demonstrate that the St. Luke Passion had value as an exportable good. The composition would have been inconceivable without the networks of international exchange linking Western Europe with portions of the Soviet bloc during the cold-war period. In these networks of exchange, Polish music proved capable of traversing distances that were not easily surmounted by the physical movement of ordinary citizens or the flow of shoddily manufactured Polish goods into Western markets. Foreign and domestic patronage integrated Polish music into the cultural life of Western Europe, where it generated capital for the composers who wrote it, the conductors who performed it, and through record sales. This previously unacknowledged economic dimension was just as key to ensuring the St. Luke Passion’s success in mid-1960s Poland as the religious import of its text, the political circumstances of its first performances, and the aesthetic draw of Penderecki’s music. Able to slip back and forth between the capitalist and socialist camps of cold-war Europe, the movement of the St. Luke Passion likewise demonstrates the limits of current frameworks for theorizing cultural production, and as such, it invites us to re-imagine these models. This paper thus participates in an emerging musicological project to understand the cultural cold war in light of its concomitant processes of globalization, in which the circulation of ideas and musical artifacts drew together otherwise opposing spheres of power and political influence.

19 NOVEMBER 2009

AMS Roundup

Spring

25 FEBRUARY 2009

CANCELLED

Carolyn Abbate, University of Pennsylvania
"The Damnation of Mignon"