Abstracts & Bios - 2017 Chapter Meeting
22-23 April, 2017
Faculty of Music, University of Toronto
Abstracts & Bios
SATURDAY MORNING
Colleen Renihan, Colette Simonot-Maiello, Eleanor Stubley, Russell Wustenberg
As librettist Mavor Moore argued, the Riel story was perfect operatic material as it featured “a compendium of universal themes that make his story at one and the same time both ours and humanity’s.” The universalism and longevity of Moore and Somers’ Louis Riel, however, remain open for debate. This panel addresses this issue, raising questions about the opera’s reception and the evolving nature of contemporary tellings of the Riel story. By considering the challenges of telling a story “across time” from narrative, aesthetic, and musical perspectives, we ask, “how do we read the opera differently in 2017 as compared with 1967?” To what extent are readings attributable to production processes, the score itself, and the changing contexts of Canada and nationhood?
Musicologist Colette Simonot-Maiello (2016) has argued that aspects of Somers’ opera, particularly the “mad” scene in Act I, are flexibly written to accommodate different interpretations of Riel’s character, but the opera as a whole presents a historical narrative that reinscribes the view of Riel as a failed hero. This narrative underscores Métis leader Howard Adams’ assertion that Canadian history traditionally presents Aboriginals as a people doomed to defeat. Does Somers’ opera work against the push for decolonization in 2017? By introducing a sampling of musical works that present Riel and the Métis in a variety of ways, she places Somers’ opera in a larger contextual framework, highlighting how music participates in shaping Canadian histories.
Musicologist Colleen Renihan considers the historiographical and post-colonialist implications of the moments of off-stage and recorded singing in the piece. How can voice and embodiment be configured in these scenes, and what are the stakes in the Riel story, specifically? As Michelle Duncan has argued, “in theory, ‘voice’ marks an impasse at the extremes of presence and absence, excess and lack” (2004, 301). This tension is a productive one, and identifies the source of these moments’ power: as both sonic lingerings and oracles, they facilitate the mobile temporality of presence, and a mythical time that enables the opera to mean beyond 1967.
Russell Wustenberg, an opera director and graduate student in musicology, explores the opera’s representation of historical characters through their modes of vocality. Taking note of Leon Major’s writings on operatic representation, Wustenberg argues that Somers employs specific vocal “modes” in active dialogue with the orchestral point of view in order to maintain positional ambiguity while representing divisive figures from Canadian history. This textual tension denies the viewer the comfort of aesthetic beauty so often used to mask contentious facets of a work, the operatic genre, and the process of its creation in both performance and in discourse.
Musicologist and conductor Eleanor Stubley addresses the significance of the score’s silences – including rests, voices, action, and the land. She has argued (2005) that over time, production differences have highlighted these silences as the fault lines at the core of the Canadian identity so eloquently alluded to by the Métis artist, Chris Moyadjian, in his Fragmented Images of Riel (1992). Through this accrual of meaning, the non-linear aspects of the opera invite comparison with the conventions of indigenous modes of story-telling—maps, stories, poems and images—where the story, to borrow a Cree narrative concept, “is always beginning.” The relationship between indigenous poetics of place and composer Harry Somers’ sense of Canada as a nation “becoming” foregrounds the tension between preserving and caring for the past and art as an agent of transformation.
Dr. Colleen Renihan recently joined the Dan School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University as Assistant Professor and Queen’s National Scholar in Music Theatre and Opera. She holds a PhD in Musicology from the University of Toronto. Colleen has published chapters in several edited collections on opera, and in the journals twentieth century music, The Journal of the Society for American Music, and Music, Sound, and the Moving Image. Her current book project examines contemporary American opera as a site of history and a source of cultural memory.
With a background in ethnomusicology and historical musicology, Colette Simonot-Maiello teaches a range of musicology courses at Brandon University, where she is also Chair of Music Research. She has presented on modern opera and Canadian music at meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Canadian University Music Society, Feminist Theory and Music, and other conferences across Canada, the United States, and the UK. Her writings on modern opera examine themes of gender, mental illness, and religion. More recently, she has begun a project examining Louis Riel as musical subject.
Eleanor Stubley combines the perspectives of conductor and musicologist to reveal the “unheard.” She wrote an award-winning short monograph about the McGill production, Louis Riel: The Story, 2005; She has written extensively on other Canadian topics (Compositional Crossroads, ed., 2008; John Weinzweig, “Ear-Dreaming,” in Weinzweig: Essays on his Life and Music, eds. John Beckwith and Brian Cherney; and Sylvia Safdie, “Portrait of a Hand at Work,” 2012), as well as performance documentaries and multimedia presentations about Canadian Music (The Pines of Emily, dir. Donald Winkler, 2005, Living Gestures, 2011). She is the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies in Music, Schulich School of Music at McGill University.
With the motto, “From the page to the stage,” Russell Wustenberg serves as factotum for opera companies big and small. His work flows between logistics, property design, and staging direction. He spends much of his year in Montréal with Opera McGill overseeing the scheduling, stage management, and communications for their previous two seasons, including their Opera B!nge Festival. He also freelances in various capacities for companies across North America, including Fargo-Moorhead Opera, Eugene Opera, Opera 5, and Tapestry Opera. In August, Russell will be in Belleview, Washington, for his professional stage directing debut with City Opera Ballet’s 1920s-era La Traviata.
Of Drones and Digital Modalities
“Live” in the Limo: Interrogating Digital Modes of Spectatorship in Twenty-First Century Opera
Megan Steigerwald, Eastman School of Music
Performed in limousines across L.A and transmitted by audience members via livestream, The Industry’s 2015 opera Hopscotch challenges conventions of operatic spectatorship. This production is part of a dynamic shift in operatic performance in the twenty-first century: a move beyond the opera house to alternative performance practices dependent on place and technology. Building upon Jenna Novak’s argument that technologically driven performances renegotiate the operatic body-voice relationship (2015), I present an analysis that accounts for audience members who, through digital modes of viewership, are cast as participants within the operas themselves. This paper explores the tension between technologically driven modes of spectatorship and the embodied voices of performers physically present with audience members. In dialogue with Auslander and Couldry, I explore the way operas such as Hopscotch put pressure on contemporary anxieties of liveness and mediation in performance. These operas incorporate forms of spectatorship dependent upon the existence of imaginaries; in accepting the existence of these imaginaries, audience members are able to take on a performative role and “create” liveness. Conversely, I suggest that performer experiences of mediation have the opposite effect: isolation from Couldry’s perceived communities. More broadly, my paper offers a critical analysis of the effects of digital media consumption on Western art forms.
Megan Steigerwald completed her MM at James Madison University in Vocal Performance (2011), and received her BA from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in English Literature (Honors) and Vocal Performance (2009). Her dissertation, “Bringing Down the House: Situating and Mediating Opera in the Twenty-First Century,” examines the dual roles of place and digital technologies in alternative-space opera productions in the United States and Canada. Her archival and ethnographic work for this project has been supported by Eastman’s Glenn T. Watkins Traveling Fellowship. Recent honors include Eastman’s Teaching Assistant Prize (2015-2016), and the Ann Clark Fehn Fellowship (2016-2017).
Collective Composition, Archives, and the Historiography of Drones
Patrick Nickleson, University of Toronto
Despite its near inaudibility to scholars and listeners, the Theatre of Eternal Music is recognized as foundational to the development of musical minimalism. Writing on the ensemble long understood it simply as “Young’s ensemble,” with K. Robert Schwarz going so far as to claim that “its sole purpose was to prolong static, endless harmonies while [Young] played” (Schwarz 1996: 37). Since Tony Conrad and John Cale’s 1990s claims that the music was collectively composed, however, the name Theatre of Eternal Music has been associated primarily with legal dispute and the complexities of post-Cagean authorship. Nevertheless, recent scholarship has done little to separate the ensemble from its mythical status, or from its function within what Branden Joseph calls the “metaphysical” history of minimalism (Joseph 2008); for example, scholars still propose an oversimplified binary: was the music a composition by Young, or the result of collective improvisation? (see Potter 2000, Grimshaw 2011).
This paper provides the first empirical overview of the ensemble’s development—during the crucial eighteen months from taking on the collective name in late 1964 through to their fabled July 1966 performance at a commune on Long Island—by connecting the available bootleg recordings to my own extensive archival work, including correspondence, radio broadcasts, newspaper advertisements, photographs, and concert posters and programs. In contrast to the assumption that the group performed a single, unchanging drone, I chronologically show how the arrival and departure of members, and changes in instrumentation and technology, altered the sound.
Patrick Nickleson is a doctoral candidate in musicology at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on authorship and historiography in minimalism, and the philosophy of Jacques Rancière. Patrick’s research has been supported by SSHRC, and by work as research assistant to Dylan Robinson, including on two fieldwork trips to the Bella Coola Valley, which led to the creation of Nuyamł-ił Kulhulmx – Singing the Earth (Robinson and composer Anna Hostman). His writing has appeared in New Music Box, Intersections, Transnational Social Review, Performance Research, and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. An article on minimalism and transcription is forthcoming in Twentieth-Century Music.
Matthew T. Shelvock, University of Western Ontario
Digital technology enables the creation of rhythmically perfect music. Despite our ability to create music featuring a measurably consistent tactus for the first time in history, listeners and musicians alike often distrust flawless rhythms made using digital recording software. In fact, hip hop producers and mix engineers actively ensure natural-sounding rhythms prevail on the records they create. As a result, many hip-hop producers and artists configure the temporal expression of drums, synthesizers, samples, and other sonic instantiations to sound humanistic, even though this music is created using technology (Routledge, 2017). This humanization process occurs via the intentional manipulation of microrhythm using digital production tools.
However, as it stands, musicologists possess few tools for analyzing the microrhythms hip hop artists venerate on recordings. Additionally, digital production tools — the instruments that establish these agogic rhythms — have only recently begun to receive thorough analysis in the emerging subfield known as music production studies (Ashgate 2012; Routledge, 2013).
To address this theoretical lacuna, this paper combines insights from the author’s previously published work on Gestalt theory (Future Technology Press, 2015), and new research on hip hop production technique (Routledge 2017, & Forthcoming), to analyze the sophisticated rhythms heard on hip hop records.
Matthew T. Shelvock is a PhD candidate (ABD) who contributes to the emerging musicological sub-field called Music Production Studies. His research, which appears in anthologies published by Routledge, Focal Press, and Future Technology Press, analyzes widely used record production practices, such as mixing and mastering. As a session guitarist, he has had the pleasure of working with Grammy/Juno/Billboard award-winning personnel such as Skip Prokop (Lighthouse, Janis Joplin), Josh Leo (Lynyrd Skynyrd, Glen Frey), and many others. Matthew’s solo music can be heard on numerous streaming platforms (iTunes, Spotify, Google, Tidal, etc) via his label, ghosttape records.
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SATURDAY AFTERNOON
“Schopenhauer’s Musical Ecology”
In his magnum opus The World as Will and Representation (1819), Arthur Schopenhauer proposes that the different registers of polyphonic music correspond to the different “grades” of earthly existence. While the busy notes of the principal melody convey the quicksilver intelligence of humans, the increasingly less active alto, tenor, and bass voices respectively evoke animal, vegetal, and inorganic realms. Schopenhauer’s analogy culminates in the startling conclusion that music and the natural world constitute two alternative versions of the same thing: will, the elusive centerpiece of the philosopher’s ontology.
Recent literature on Schopenhauer has dismissed his analogy between music and world as a cosmological curiosity, as too narrow in its view of musical texture, or as irrelevant to the larger metaphysical interpretation of music he advances (known to musicologists mostly through Wagner’s distorting lens). Yet Schopenhauer’s recognition of mineral, vegetal, and animal grades of will in human bodies makes his philosophy of music well worth revisiting at a time of burgeoning interest in the affinities between and interdependencies among humans and nonhumans. This paper argues that, despite his reputation as a metaphysician, Schopenhauer’s overriding empiricism and fascination with the natural world sheds valuable, and surprisingly timely, light on the intricacies of musical embodiment. If “my body and my will are one,” as the philosopher claimed, then hearing music as an expression of will is necessarily a bodily affair, one that, I argue, offers listeners intuitive access to organic and inorganic dimensions of existence that both inform and extend beyond the human.
Holly Watkins is Chair and Associate Professor of Musicology at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, where she has taught since receiving her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. Her 2011 book Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E. T. A. Hoffmann to Arnold Schoenberg was published in Cambridge University Press’s series New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism. Her essays on the aesthetics, philosophy, and ecology of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music have appeared in such venues as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, 19th-Century Music, Current Musicology, Contemporary Music Review, and Evental Aesthetics. She is currently completing a book entitled Musical Vitalities, which brings posthumanist sensibilities to bear on the “life” of music as it has been understood by organicist, formalist, philosophical, and biosemiotic discourses on music and sound production.
Business Meeting
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Colonial and National Resonances
Landscape Music through a Settler-Colonial Lens
Hester Bell Jordan, McGill University
“Landscape” is a theme that appears frequently in discourses about music from the former British colonies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Often linked to nationalistic identities in these settler societies, the colonial roots of these discourses have so far not been considered by music historians. I argue that far from being an innocuous choice of musical subject matter, landscape is historically connected to past and present struggles over land claims between indigenous peoples and settler-colonial governments, and therefore must be interrogated (Mitchell, 1994). This paper examines three works connected to landscape by their respective composers: North Country (1948) by Canadian Harry Somers (1925-1999), Symphony No. 3 in B minor, “Australia” (1951) by Australian Alfred Hill (1869-1960), and Overture: Aotearoa (1940) by New Zealander Douglas Lilburn (1915-2001). By examining the pieces’ reception, statements made by the composers, and particular musical features, I show how the works and their creators can be seen as having participated in a wider settler-colonial project that constructed indigenous land as empty wilderness prime for the taking by settlers. My argument is informed by theories formulated by scholars of settler-colonialism, art history, and literary studies, where scholarship on the political significance of landscape is well established (Mitchell, 1994; Skinner, 2014; Veracini, 2010). These issues remain relevant today, as examples of landscape-themed music continue to be cast as unproblematic expressions of Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand national identities (see, for instance, Cherney, 1975; Norman, 2006).
Hester Bell Jordan received her Master of Music in Musicology (2015) and Bachelor of Music in Violin Performance (2013) from the New Zealand School of Music in Wellington, New Zealand. She is currently in the first year of a PhD program in Musicology with a concentration in Gender and Women’s Studies at McGill University, and is supervised by Tom Beghin. Hester’s primary research focuses on gender and gesture in women’s musical performance in a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European context. Since moving to Canada in 2016 she has also become interested in exploring issues concerning music and settler-colonialism.
Zachary Milliman, McGill University
Hungarian Canadian composer István Anhalt’s first two “mind operas,” La Tourangelle (1975) and Winthrop (1983) take as their subjects’ two colonial figures of the New World: the Francophone Marie de l’Incarnation and Anglophone John Winthrop respectively. Anhalt referred to the eponymous characters these operas as “spiritual guides” in learning about his new home in Canada, and conflated the experience of colonialists and immigrants. The composer himself rejected the label of “exile” often applied to him and rather saw his emigration as part of his ongoing self-realization. He mapped this onto his operatic protagonists as well and focused on the hero journey of his subjects. In so doing, Anhalt projected colonial legitimacy: immigrants and colonialists alike experience what Heidegger called Geworfenheit (throwness) and multiplicity, with the New World providing liberation for the composer and his musical subjects. This approach in effect subverted some of the complicated issues inherent in the title characters’ colonial enterprises, specifically vis-à-vis their impact on the indigenous population.
Because Anhalt saw these figures as two of Canada’s most influential figures that bequeathed an important heritage, it behooves us to question what that heritage is and how it finds expression today. The goal of this study is to situate these works in post-colonial discourse and to identify the colonial dialogics at play in order to operatically investigate narratives that deny utterance to the indigenous voice. This paper thus participates in the ongoing process of problematizing inherited narratives of colonialism and colonial figures through discursive analysis of the operas, specifically engaging with the semiotics of representation, identity politics, and religion.
Zachary Milliman is a first-year PhD student in musicology at McGill University. His dissertation will explore the intersection of opera and politics in Cold War era Hungarian language opera. His broader research interests involve the examination opera as it functions outside the mainstream centers. In 2015-2016 Zachary was a Fulbright scholar working as a fellow at the Hungarian Musicological Institute. He is also the co-founder of the non-profit organization the Composer Discovery Initiative, and former lecturer at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He holds a BM from Brigham Young University as well as an MM from the University of Utah.
(1707-1734)
Zoey M. Cochran, McGill University
Conventionally, early eighteenth-century drammi per musica present a clear distinction between enlightened castrato heroes and conspiring villains, where the primo uomo unequivocally plays the role of the hero. Along with the traditional lieto fine of these operas, this has led scholars to view these works as an expression of the ideology of absolute rulers (Feldman, 2007; Strohm, 1997). I argue that these power dynamics change in the context of contested foreign rule.
In this paper, I look at three drammi per musica set to music by Domenico Sarri and performed in Naples during a period of political instability rife with local conspiracies against Austrian rule (1713–14; 1718–20). Not only do Sarri’s operas end tragically (Arsace, 1718) or with a tyrannicide (I gemelli rivali, 1713 and Ginevra principessa di Scozia, 1720), but they also blur the lines between heroes and villains. Indeed, Sarri turns villains into serious contenders for primo uomo status: performed by castrati, they sing more arias than the other male characters (Polinesso in Ginevra) or as many as the heroic primo uomo (Artabano in Arsace). In the case of I gemelli rivali, all male roles for soprano voice apart from that of the evil king Parrasio were assigned to women, making him the primo and only uomo of the opera. By casting doubt on the parallel between hero and primo uomo, Sarri brings into question the heroic status of the real-life political primo uomo (the absolute ruler), a powerful choice in the context of foreign rule.
Zoey M. Cochran is a PhD candidate at McGill University, where she studies the politics of early eighteenth-century drammi per musica created in Italy under Austrian domination. More generally, she focuses on the relationship between opera, Italian language and cultural history, and Italian identity. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Music and Letters and Keyboard Perspectives and she has presented on topics ranging from the madrigal and the questione della lingua to Italian fascist operas in international musicological and interdisciplinary conferences. Her research on the use of Tuscan in eighteenth-century Neapolitan comic opera won her the Proctor prize (2012).
in Late Nineteenth-Century Prague
Eva Branda, University of Western Ontario
With discernible scorn, one Czech critic declared in 1885 that “the Viennese audience... swears by the newspapers.” Indeed, as David Brodbeck observes, music critics in fin-de-siècle Vienna tended to have an uncommonly high degree of sway over popular opinion (Brodbeck, 2014). Using the example of Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904), this paper, in turn, investigates the relationships between audiences and critics in late nineteenth-century Prague. To a certain extent, critics in Prague – like their Viennese counterparts – undoubtedly moulded public views of Dvořák. In an environment where literacy rates were high and print culture was generally becoming a force to be reckoned with, Czech critics were positioned to have considerable local reach. However, rather than acting merely as passive recipients, audiences in Prague did much of the shaping and manipulating themselves. Audience response was crucial in determining whether a performance could be characterized as a triumph in the press; accessibility to the public was considered by critics to be an important consideration in assessments of Dvořák’s works; and the prevailingly patriotic institutions at which Dvořák’s compositions were performed in Prague made audiences view everything through a “scrim of romantic nationalism,” as Michael Beckerman expresses it (Beckerman, 1993), leading critics to devote an inordinate amount of attention to the “Czechness” of Dvořák’s music.
Eva Branda holds a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Toronto (2014). Her research explores Dvořák’s reception in the Czech lands during the late nineteenth century and highlights the complicated relationships and interactions among critics, audiences, and composers. Dr. Branda has presented papers at various conferences, including annual and chapter meetings of the AMS; Nineteenth-Century Music; the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies; and MusCan. She has a forthcoming article in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association. Dr. Branda has taught at the University of Waterloo and is currently a course instructor at Western University.
SUNDAY MORNING
Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Repertory and Queer Musical Nostalgia
Kristen Franseen, McGill University
Better known to historians of sexuality as the author of the gay novel Imre: A Memorandum (1906) and history of homosexuality The Intersexes (1908), Edward Prime-Stevenson (1858-1942) was a celebrated music critic in New York City during the 1890s. While historians recognize Prime-Stevenson’s significance to LGBTQ literature, his role in preserving queer musical knowledge remains unexplored. Following his move to Europe, Prime-Stevenson self-published his music criticism, research on sexuality, and fiction for a select readership. His last book, A Repertory of One Hundred Symphonic Programmes (1932/3) presents the phonograph as both a method of musical preservation and a nostalgic window into a lost past.
Organized as a collection of “playlists” of symphonic movements for communal listening, Repertory also includes excerpts from Prime-Stevenson’s music criticism and poetry. While his choice of repertoire does not immediately reinforce the queer modes of listening he espoused in The Intersexes, the focus on Wagner, dedication to ex-lover Harry Harkness Flagler, and spaces for personal reflections all align with Prime-Stevenson’s idealized views on musical, sexual, and social connections. Although Repertory at first appears to be a conventional guide to music appreciation with the aid of phonograph recordings, a close reading of the introduction and appendices reveals that Prime-Stevenson saw the musical experience as closely tied to his views on sexuality and lifelong pursuit of a musical-sexual social network. Instead of viewing record-collecting as a largely solitary pursuit, Prime-Stevenson focuses on intimate connections forming between listeners in the present as well as across time and space.
Kristin Franseen is a PhD candidate in Musicology at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. Her dissertation, supervised by Lloyd Whitesell, is entitled “Queer Musical Knowledge in the Arts-Science Archive, ca. 1890-1940.” Kristin has presented her research at the Society for American Music, the Forum for the International Association of Word and Music Studies, and the Société québécoise de recherche en musique. Her other research interests include early nineteenth-century mechanical music and Enlightenment politics in the operas of Antonio Salieri.
David Miller, Cornell University
In October 1936, Nicolas Slonimsky penned an article for the Boston-based Christian Science Monitor entitled "The Orchestral Score." Slonimsky was a frequent advocate of contemporary music, so the article’s featuring of relatively new music—the fourth of Anton Webern's Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 10—comes as no surprise. More surprising is the article’s appearance on the Monitor's Children's Page. In order to render it accessible to children, Slonimsky simplifies Webern's six-measure-long score. German words are translated into English, all parts are written in non-transposing G-clefs, and, most intriguingly, drawings of each instrument appear next to their first entrances (an old-fashioned metronome even sits beside the tempo marking). Slonimsky’s text likewise calls attention to the instruments, describing the celesta’s "sweet metallic tones," calling the viola a "grown-up Violin," and noting how “all the world loves the Drum.” Though he admits the instrument drawings are "our own little invention," Slonimsky believes "they make the whole thing so much clearer."
Slonimsky sent a copy of the article to Webern and in January 1937 the composer responded, describing the "special joy," "uncommon satisfaction," and "real consolation" of seeing his music presented with children in mind, and arguing that contemporary culture would be better off if adults possessed "as few prejudices as children.” Slonimsky’s efforts towards accessibility resonated with the Second Viennese School’s Fasslichkeit ("comprehensibility") aesthetic and his article focused on qualities that Webern valued in his music, like clarity and sonorous vitality. Furthermore, music of and for children was nothing new for Webern; op. 10 was inspired by memories of his mother and his first twelve-tone composition was 1924’s Kinderstück (“children’s piece”) for piano. Ultimately, Slonimsky’s article places op. 10 alongside the Kinderstück, both redefinitions of what modern children’s music could be.
David H. Miller is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and a Graduate Resident Fellow at Hans Bethe House on Cornell’s West Campus. David studied music at Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude with highest honors and was awarded a Paine Fellowship for postgraduate study in Vienna, Austria. He is currently writing a dissertation on the reception of Anton Webern's music in the United States.
James Deaville, Carleton University
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) is typically read as an allegory of post-war America (Nichols 1976, Dercle 1992). However, I argue that disability – filtered through the lenses of hearing loss and madness – serves as a primary factor behind that narrative. Thus, protagonist George Bailey had lost hearing in his left ear from having heroically saved his brother from drowning. By focusing the analysis of disability discourse on George’s hearing impairment, we can better understand director Frank Capra’s troubling vision of America in that era. Also called a paranoid “psychotic break” into reality (Berlatsky 2016), George’s nightmarish manic episode of life in Bedford Falls as if he had never existed may restore full hearing, yet it unveils to him the harsh aspects of contemporary life in America (and Pottersville). There moral decadence and racial integration hold sway, as heard in the jazz of Nick’s bar and the town’s pleasure palaces.
This paper explores what it means to hear and not-hear in Capra’s slice of American life. The film’s narrative depicts George as living the “failed American dream” (Beckerman 2016), which his partial deafness only affirms. While George’s disability hinders him from hearing key dialogue in Bedford Falls, the restoration of full hearing only facilitates his alienation from the alternate storyline of Pottersville. That this crucial revelation occurs as George is “hearing through madness” reflects the age’s (and Capra’s) racialized defamation of jazz. Moreover, George’s failed dream of reality is also Capra’s, who had tragically lost his deaf son ten years earlier.
James Deaville teaches Music in the School for Studies in Art and Culture at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. He has edited Music in Television (Routledge, 2010) and has co-edited Music and the Broadcast Experience (Oxford, 2016). He is currently working on a study of music and sound in cinematic trailers, a result of the Trailaurality research group that has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He is also undertaking a co-edited anthology on music and advertising as one of the Oxford Handbooks.
Transhistorical Intertextual Allusions
Of Pink Lasers and Consecrated Stages: Parsifal and VALIS
Daniel Sheridan, McMaster University
In his novel VALIS, Philip K. Dick invokes Wagner’s Parsifal as a potential explanation for the visions experienced by protagonist Horselover Fat; Fat is convinced that a pink laser-beam has given him the ability to experience past, present, and future simultaneously, which is likened to Gurnemanz’s proclamation that “time becomes space” in the realm of the Grail.
This paper will investigate the narrative and thematic overlaps between the opera and the novel to demonstrate that Dick’s citations of Wagner represent more than simple references. Rather, I argue that the philosophical and artistic outlooks of the novel are kindred spirits with those of Wagner. Dick’s use of religious themes resonates within Wagner’s treatment of the magical/spiritual properties of the Grail: the titular VALIS is a reality-changing satellite that transfers information about the nature of the universe, thereby facilitating communication with advanced intelligences. Compare this to Wagner’s Grail, which brings Monstalvat into contact with divine forces. In both works, something ungraspable to everyday experience is imposed upon the “real” world in order to alter perceptions about reality.
Wagner’s alteration lay in his intent to “consecrate” the stage through the musical alteration of the progression and the perception of time; VALIS similarly “consecrates” by revealing the illusory nature of time, society, existence, etc. The paper posits that Dick sees his novel as carrying out a similar project to Wagner: “consecrating” all types of stages (music, drama, literature, etc.) by attempting to radically alter our perceptions and engagements with them.
Daniel Sheridan has recently been an instructor in music history at McMaster University. He earned a PhD in Cultural Mediations from Carleton University with a dissertation entitled “Wagner and ‘Grand Opera: Performing the Nation Through Embodied Sonorous Spectacle.” Daniel has published in “The Wagner Journal” and “Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music” and is a contributor to the Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia and the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd Edition. He also has forthcoming contributions to the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World.
Jess Tyre, Crane School of Music, State University of New York at Potsdam
In an article about allusions in Brahms Alto Rhapsody (2012), Christopher Reynolds called for research into the “musical traditions” inhabiting nineteenth-century settings of the Faust legend. This paper considers intertextuality within a number of treatments to uncover stylistic dialogues offering levels of significance that do not rely on agency. It borrows theories by Hatten, Monelle, and especially Klein, who has argued for the analysis of “transhistoric” texts “interlinked in multiple directions.”
Borrowing from Monelle and Klein, I use settings of Gretchen’s Prayer as a springboard for analyzing intertextual resonance in treatments of the Faust drama. Establishing motivic and rhythmic parallels between Schubert’s setting and the Poenitentium’s “sighing” theme in Schumann’s Szenen aus Goethe’s Faust, I argue that Schumann’s motive alludes to the children’s tune “Ringel, Ringel, Rosen.” The reference underscores Gretchen’s essential innocence and is strengthened by its association with the Blessed Unborn Boys of Heaven, who scatter rose petals upon Mephistopheles. Broadening the analysis, I show how Schumann’s depiction of Faust’s death – with a motive related to both Gretchen’s Prayer and significantly, the Garden Scene – is echoed in Martucci’s song “A’l folto bosco, placida ombría,” which recalls the memory of falling in love in a wooded grove. Martucci’s text refers to “fiamme ardenti,” and in Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust, Marguerite sings similarly (“D’amour l’ardente flamme”), a variation of the Schumann/Martucci figure informing her scene. Through these references, topics (the “pianto” and “sigh”) and as yet unidentified proto-topical gestures project the drama’s chief symbols.
Jess Tyre’s research has focused on early twentieth-century French music criticism. He has published in the Journal of Musicology, the Journal of the Haydn Society of North America, the Beethoven Journal, and the Journal of Music Education Research, and read papers at meetings of the American Musicological Society, the American Historical Association, the International Conference on Romanticism, the Haydn Bicentenary Conference, and the North American Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music. Professor Tyre’s most recent work concerns intertextuality in nineteenth-century program music, and he has an article forthcoming on stylistic intersections in settings of the Francesca da Rimini episode in Dante’s Inferno.
announcement of student paper prize
