American Musicological Societysouthern Chapter
American Musicological SocietySouthern Chapter
Annual Meeting
19–20 February 2016
Palm Beach Atlantic University
School of Music and Fine Arts
Helen K. Persson Recital Hall
West Palm Beach, Florida
PROGRAM
FRIDAY, 19 February 2016
8:00–8:45 a.m.Registration and Breakfast
8:45–8:55Opening remarks: Dr. Lloyd Mims
Dean of the School of Music and Fine Arts, Palm Beach Atlantic University
9:00–10:30 Session 1: Re-Examining Historical Narratives
Joseph Sargent (University of Montevallo), chair
Leoncavallo’s “Appunti” and the History of PagliacciAndreas Giger, Louisiana State University
Constructing a Narrative:
Reexamining Theodor Adorno’s Alban Berg:
Master of the Smallest Link through Source Study
Morgan Rich, University of Florida
The Doxastarion of Markos Domestikos Notated in the New Analytical Method:
A Critical Analysis of a Musical Legacy
Christina Filis, Palm Beach Atlantic University
10:30–10:50Break
10:50–12:20Session 2: The Musical Body: Sound, Gender, and Faith
Sarah Eyerly (Florida State University), chair
“The Beauty of Israel Is Slain”: William Billings’s Anthem for the Reinterment of Dr. Joseph Warren
Charles Brewer, Florida State University
Embodying Faith and Fandom: Songs of Identity in Depression-Era Gospel Singing Communities
C. Megan MacDonald, Florida State University
Whistling’s Sonic Ambiguity and Its Impact
on the Whistler’s Body
Maribeth Clark, New College of Florida
12:20–2:00 Lunch
2:00–3:00 Session 3: Gender and Politics on Stage and Screen
Jamie Younkin (Florida Institute of
Technology), chair
“Ain’t I Always Been a Good Husband?”:
Male Characters as Keys to Portraying the
Wayward Woman in Street Scene
McKenna Milici, Florida State University
Empathy, Ethics, and Film Music: Alfred Schnittke and Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977)
Maria Cizmic, University of South Florida
3:00–3:20Break
3:20–4:20Session 4: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Long Nineteenth Century
Andreas Giger (Louisiana State University), chair
Mozart’s Don Giovanni as a Prototype for the
Romantic German Tragedy
Navid Bargrizan, University of Florida
Guilty until Proven Innocent:
Thomas Davis and the Struggles of Irish Art Music
Timothy Love, Louisiana State University
4:25–5:10Business Meeting
SATURDAY, 20 February 2016
8:30–9:00 a.m.Registration and Breakfast
9:00–10:00Session 5: Music Creation and Music Education
Michael O’Connor (Palm Beach Atlantic
University), chair
“Going to School and Winning the Olympics”:
A Musicological Examination of Childsongs at a Tallahassee Community Center
Carrie Danielson, Florida State University
Sousa’s Band Arrangements of Orchestral Works
and/as Public Education
Bryan Proksch, Lamar University
10:00–10:20Break
10:20–11:50Session 6: Conclusions
Michael Broyles (Florida State University), chair
Out of the Back Row: Ferdinand Hiller’s Views on Composing Applied to His String Quartets
Douglass Seaton, Florida State University
Stravinsky’s Three Japanese Lyrics and the
Concept of Two-Dimensional Music
DongJin Shin, University of Florida
John Adams and the Avant-Garde, 1971–72
Michael Palmese, Louisiana State University
ABSTRACTS
FRIDAY, 19 February
Session 1: Re-Examining Historical Narratives
Joseph Sargent (University of Montevallo), chair
Leoncavallo’s “Appunti” and the History of PagliacciAndreas Giger (Louisiana State University)
In 1943 Allied bombs destroyed the archives of Leoncavallo’s publisher (Sonzogno) and the theater where Pagliacci was first performed (the Teatro Dal Verme). In light of the resulting scarcity of sources pertaining to the opera’s compositional history, scholarship has relied almost exclusively on Leoncavallo’s autobiographical “Appunti,” without sufficiently verifying the information they contain. Sources such as notifications in the press, eyewitness accounts, and Leoncavallo’s unpublished correspondence with Sonzogno, however, point to a history of Pagliacci that substantially differs from the one told in the “Appunti.”
The primary sources contradict Leoncavallo’s stories of having auditioned for Sonzogno with only the libretto and of having based the plot on a crime of passion he remembered from his youth. Regarding the latter, Leoncavallo was twice charged with having imitated an existing play, first Manuel Tamayo y Baus’s Un drama nuevo (1867), then Catulle Mendès’s La femme de Tabarin (1874). Leoncavallo denied having known either work. In defense against the charge, he embellished in his “Appunti” the crime of passion from his youth with details taken from the libretto of Pagliacci. Scholarship has never asked whether Leoncavallo knew Un drama nuevo at the time he wrote the libretto or, if he did, in what version. Although he probably did not know the play at the time, he may have included elements unique to Ermete Novelli’s adaptation—then performed in Italy as Un dramma nuovo—in a crucial later addition to the opera, the “Prologue.”
When Leoncavallo auditioned for Sonzogno, he played for him an opera he (1) considered to be complete without “Prologue” (the ostensible “veristic manifesto”) and (2) would tie to a “real” event only after having been accused of imitating existing plays. With two strong veristic arguments put in perspective, Pagliacci’s relationship to verismo will have to be corrected even further than has recently been suggested.
Constructing a Narrative:
Reexamining Theodor Adorno’s Alban Berg:
Master of the Smallest Link through Source Study
Morgan Rich, University of Florida
In his 1968 monograph, Alban Berg: Der Meister des kleinsten Übergangs, Adorno posits a revolutionary understanding of Berg’s idiosyncratic musical language, portraying Berg as a composer able to construct the grand totality of a piece from an atomistic detail. Yet this monograph is often misunderstood because of its seemingly nostalgic view of the composer, considered to be a vehicle for the late Adorno to reflect fondly upon his teacher. Because of its highly personal narrative, Adorno is criticized for lacking detailed analysis and ignoring many elements of Berg’s musical language. To be sure, as a culmination of his life’s work on Berg, the monograph was a calculated combination of essays and analyses intended to form a narrative of Berg’s character and his music. The background ideas for this work originate from several of Adorno’s previous essays on Berg: from “Zur Uraufführung des Wozzeck” (1925) to “Bergs kompositionstechnische Funde” (1963).
Based on previously unexamined manuscripts by Adorno, housed in both the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv as well as the Alban Berg Archiv at the Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek Musik Sammlung, I demonstrate that this monograph was planned as early as 1936, but underwent periodic changes, being constantly reshaped until its publication in 1968. Even Adorno played a part in the misconceptions of this book, stating in the preface that its genesis was the result of a request from the publisher Elisabeth Lafite in the late 1960s. He also states, perhaps purposely misleading, that while a few materials were adapted from analytical essays published in a 1937 volume on Berg edited by Willi Reich, most of the materials were newly written in 1968.
As I argue in this paper, from the moment he met Berg in 1925, Adorno systematically constructed a dialectic narrative of Alban Berg and his music, resulting in Alban Berg: Der Meister des kleinsten Übergangs. For the first time I offer a detailed look at the archival materials, whose documents range from handwritten drafts from 1936 to multiple typed drafts and pre-publication exemplars from the 1950s through 1968. The ideas he kept from 1936 to the edits he made in consecutive drafts illustrate the process under which Adorno crafted his narrative.
The Doxastarion of Markos Domestikos Notated in the New Analytical Method:
A Critical Analysis of a Musical Legacy
Christina Filis, Palm Beach Atlantic University
The New Analytical Method that is attributed to the famous “Three Teachers” of the Eastern Orthodox Church, came from an effort to simplify and standardize the neumatic-style of Old Byzantine chant notation, into a more precise type of notation that would help to preserve melodies. This reformation of notation was adopted by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1814 and is credited to Chrysanthos Madytos (1770-1846), Gregorios Protopsaltis (d. 1821) and Chourmouzios Chartophylax (d. 1840). One of their primary goals of their efforts was to transcribe the works of Petros Lambadarios (d. 1778) for the first time in the New Analytical Method, in particular his Doxastarion.
A Doxastarion is a music book that contains Glorias for specific festal periods and saints, as well as chant for the Great Hours of the liturgy. Gregorios and Chourmouzios each created editions that were transcriptions of Petros’ Doxastarion. These editions would become standard repertoire for singers in the Greek Orthodox Church.
Gregorios and Chourmouzios studied under the same teacher, Iakovos Protopsaltis (d. 1800), who had an additional student, Manuel Protopsaltis (d. 1819). Manuel’s student, Markos Domestikos, also created a transcription of the Doxastarion according to the New Analytical Method, where he claims to have made corrections to Gregorios’ version directed by his teacher. That claim, investigated here, is particularly important for Byzantine musicology, especially due to the significance of Gregorios’ contribution to the Church. Based upon a thorough investigation and comparative analysis of the Doxastaria of Gregorios Protopsaltis (1821), Chourmouzios Chartophylax (1820) and Markos Domestikos (1831), I show inconsistencies in Markos’ claim and stylistic differences between the Doxastaria that prove that no critical edition of the earlier chant existed in transcription in the New Analytical Method.
Session 2: The Musical Body: Sound, Gender, and Faith
Sarah Eyerly (Florida State University), chair
“The Beauty of Israel Is Slain”: William Billings’s Anthem for the Reinterment of Dr. Joseph Warren
Charles Brewer, Florida State University
In eighteenth century New England, funerals were generally private affairs and even a parishioner’s passing may have only been noted on the following Sunday. Since there was little need, most composers included only a single funeral anthem in their collections; William Billings, however, composed six. One of these is well documented: Billings’s “Samuel the Priest” was performed at the funeral of Rev. Samuel Cooper on 2 January 1784. The original purpose for his other extensive funeral anthem, “The Beauty of Israel is Slain,” is not specified either in its first publication or external documents. While Billings’s short and generic “Funeral Anthem” is based on a text commonly used for funeral sermons, “The Beauty of Israel” sets a passage from 2 Samuel 1 that was used rarely, and then only for the funerals of those due “civill respects or deferences.”
There is one figure in revolutionary Boston whose memorial service may have merited elaborate music. Based on contemporary documents, music formed part of the elaborate Masonic service for the reinternment of Dr. Joseph Warren on 8 April 1776, who died at the Battle of Bunker Hill on 17 June 1775. The service was planned by the Saint Andrew’s Lodge, whose members (including Paul Revere and Josiah Flagg, and later, in 1778, Billings) were “desirous of taking up the deceased’s remains, and, in the usual funeral solemnities of that society, to decently inter the same.” As noted in the pamphlet Jachin and Boaz (1762), a Masonic burial service would have been conducted “with the choristers on each side, and the mourners at the foot, the service is rehearsed, an anthem sung.” Since the service in Boston took place in King’s Chapel, and included an elaborate oration by Perez Morton, it is likely that Billings’s anthem on the text traditionally applied to heros would have been especially appropriate on this day. By 1800, “The Beauty of Israel is Slain” was even reappropriated for a commemoration of George Washington.
Embodying Faith and Fandom: Songs of Identity in Depression-Era Gospel Singing Communities
C. Megan MacDonald, Florida State University
During the Great Depression, a time marked by migration and unemployment, the southern gospel industry flourished. Publishers produced records, hosted singing schools, sent quartets to perform at conventions, and sold millions of songbooks each year. Beyond a commercial popular music, the songbooks bound together faith-based singing communities where participants could reconcile shifting identities of gender, race, and regionalism in song. Publishers produced consumable products—songbooks and recordings—but the industry thrived due to creations of fan culture, such as submissions of songs and poetry to songbooks and fan newsletters.
This paper argues that these products of fan culture reveal performances of shifting intersectional identities that transformed into shared experiences through the individual and the communal embodiment of song. When the books were released every six months, singers quickly learned the four-part harmonies and the lyrics echoed from homes and churches to conventions and concerts. Often songs like “I’ll Fly Away” emerged from the intended ephemerality of the books to preserve lasting impressions of the South and the Great Depression. Songwriters addressed complex theological and cultural constructions of identity—affected by migration, labor, motherhood, and whiteness—in musical arrangements. These arrangements were then breathed into sound by the community as a whole. While the publishers produced the books, they were merely conduits and gatekeepers for these embodied expressions of faith. This research expands on the recent studies of southern gospel publishers by Goff, Shearon, and Harrison to include voices of the community through critical examination of song lyrics, songbook covers, interviews, and gospel newsletters housed at archives at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Emory University, the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, and the Library of Congress. These materials provide a vantage point to better understand how the embodiment of individual and communal song creates meaning and articulates identity in faith-based communities.
Whistling’s Sonic Ambiguity and Its Impact
on the Whistler’s Body
Maribeth Clark, New College of Florida
This paper examines the powerful and vague sound of human whistling, constructing a theoretical frame for consideration of the activity as a commonplace musical act in the United States. Whistling’s ambiguity lies in its loose association with the sounding body. Rather than emphasizing the body’s presence, as does the “grain” of the singing voice (Barthes), The flutelike tone lacks markers that connect it with a body. Its lack of a creator’s stamp or brand invites speculation and meaning-making. This status of the sound as anonymous and open makes it flexible. It can be interpreted as a voice, as a signal, as an ingredient of language, as music. Being a powerful sound, it was often prohibited, and the people who could whistle—either well or poorly—were often silenced. Sailors do not whistle in order to prevent raising gale winds. Russians do not whistle indoors because it is bad luck. Women in the US who whistle, like crowing hens, always come to some bad end. Men should not whistle because it is an activity for boys.
Taking this ambiguity of the sound into account, this paper considers the reception of whistling in short stories and articles found in nineteenth-century American newspapers, novels (Little Women and Rose of Dutcher’s County), and the popular press. It looks at fictional whistlers (Jo, Little Women; Rose, The Rose of Dutcher County) and their professional real-world counterparts, such as the white, middle-class divorcée Alice J. Shaw and the freed slave George Washington Johnson. One sees many discussions of gender framed through discussions of whistling. Discussions of whistling and whistlers, I argue, seemed to serve as an aural ink blot, revealing attitudes about gendered bodies and their appropriate expression through sound. The ambiguity of whistling contributed to its power to shape the perception of a whistler’s gender, a power over which the producer of the whistle had little control.
Session 3: Gender and Politics on Stage and Screen
Jamie Younkin (Florida Institute of Technology), chair
“Ain’t I Always Been a Good Husband?”:
Male Characters as Keys to Portraying the
Wayward Woman in Street Scene
McKenna Milici, Florida State University
When Kurt Weill wrote Street Scene (1947), based on Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, he endeavored to create a new American operatic idiom crafted for the Broadway stage. Because much of Weill’s writings on this Broadway opera focuses on the topic of genre, scholarship on Street Scene has largely engaged the work on Weill’s own terms, investigating whether his attempt to synthesize musical theater and opera was successful or not. Street Scene is also remarkable in the way it highlights the female experience in mid-century America, as its characters exemplify a nuanced conception of male and female roles, resulting in a commentary on conventional gender dynamics. The show centers on Mrs. Maurrant, a mother of two and known adulterer, and reviews of the original production indicate the ambiguity in how this character was perceived. In addition to the portrayal of Mrs. Maurrant through her own music and text, we come to understand the confines of her situation through the character development of the two men that frame her: her husband and her lover. This paper explores how the audience’s relationship with Mrs. Maurrant is shaped by the musical portrayal of these two men. A close reading of the choices Weill made for these male characters reveals how their musical characterization affects the reception of Mrs. Maurrant, a perspective not available to audiences of Rice’s original play. Investigating Weill’s notes and sketches in Street Scene’s archival materials also uncovers other depictions Weill explored in representing these characters. At a time when society extolled women as guardians of the family unit and its accompanying domestic space, Street Scene offers a sympathetic portrayal of a character that failed to fit this role.
Empathy, Ethics, and Film Music: Alfred Schnittke and Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977)
Maria Cizmic, University of South Florida
Larisa Shepitko’s 1977 film The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye) had a large impact on late socialist culture with its tale of surviving both natural and human elements during WWII. Drawing on Dominick LaCapra’s and Carolyn Dean’s work on empathy, this essay will consider how Alfred Schnittke’s film score for The Ascent shapes an audience’s empathetic response to the physical, emotional, psychological, and ethical travails of two Soviet partisans, the film’s central characters. The Ascent brings together several themes that were important to late socialist culture: a persistent fascination with the Great Patriotic War, a concern for historical memory in general, and a focus on morally complex issues, particularly loyalty and betrayal. At critical moments in the film’s narrative, Schnittke’s music lends insight into each soldier’s internal experience of war and thereby constructs an audience’s sense of empathy for both soldiers. What can such an experience of film-music empathy tell us about the meanings ascribed to the past and the relevance of moral issues during late socialist culture?