Abstracts for NYSSL chapter 2018
Abstracts for NYS-SL Chapter Meeting, 2018
Session 1: The 1960s: Space Age and War
“The First International Webern Festival; or, It Happened at the World's Fair”
David H. Miller (Cornell University)
In an April 1962 article previewing the First International Webern Festival, musicologist Hans Moldenhauer promised that Webern’s music would one day be known as “the music of the space age.” Moldenhauer’s words were carefully chosen. The Webern Festival was set to take place in Seattle at the same time as the World’s Fair, an event so focused on futuristic technologies that its central building was named the Space Needle. By evoking the aesthetic of the World’s Fair, then, Moldenhauer sought to elevate the profile of the Webern Festival.
Yet the two “W.F.s” made for an awkward pairing. The opening night of the Webern Festival was held on the grounds of the World’s Fair and featured the world premiere of Webern’s Im Sommerwind. An orchestral tone poem composed in 1904, Im Sommerwind had been unknown until its discovery by Moldenhauer in 1960. Far from space-age music, Im Sommerwind’s lush textures and sweeping gestures revealed a young Webern rooted in late nineteenth-century Romanticism. The work’s nature-worshipping program, furthermore, contrasted sharply with the fair’s technological urbanism. The remainder of the Webern Festival took place on the forested campus of the University of Washington, a site better suited to the premieres of several other early Webern works that followed. But the tension between the Webern Festival and the World’s Fair was an indication of the shape that Webern reception would take in the ensuing decades. For some, Webern was the last of the Romantics; for others, he was the first space-age composer.
“A Crisis of American Identity: Elie Siegmeister’s Vietnam War Works”
April Pauline Morris (University of Western Ontario)
The Vietnam War period was a fraught time in American history, during which strongly
held and antithetical opinions about American involvement in the conflict prompted widespread
social unrest and protest. Media coverage of the brutal realities of wartime and suspicions about
the government’s motivations led many citizens to question America’s exceptionalism and
position of moral high ground. Many musical works from the 1960s and 1970s reflect the social
unrest of the period; both Arnold (1991) and Kinsella (2005) have pointed to changes in the
nature of war compositions written about this conflict. However, the existing scholarship on
Vietnam War works fails to investigate this repertoire in the context of changing conceptions of
national identity.
In this paper I demonstrate that Elie Siegmeister’s The Face of War and “Evil,” both
composed in 1967, are not only provocative works of protest to the Vietnam War, but also
provide insight into this crisis of American national identity. I analyze these works as well as
Siegmeister’s commentary on them through the lens of musical Americanism, demonstrating
ways in which the composer’s use of musical style, social spirit, and national ideals reveals
multifaceted and paradoxical representations of what it meant to be American. I argue that these
two compositions present an American perspective that is very much a product of its time; a
perspective that is both tied to and eschews an earlier conception of American national identity
that has been fractured and tainted by America’s role in the Vietnam War.
Session 2: American Women's Voices
“Ethel Merman, Gypsy, and the Birth of the Broadway ‘Belt’”
John Kapusta (Eastman School of Music)
Today scholars and fans alike recognize the so-called Broadway “belt”—the clarion, high-lying women’s vocal practice—as an icon of the Broadway stage. Despite its centrality to US musical theater production and reception, though, the history of this now ubiquitous term has gone underanalyzed. Though the tradition of “belt”-like theatrical singing in the United States can be traced at least to the early 1900s, the term “belt” only emerged in theatrical contexts around midcentury (after it had been previously used to describe ebullient jazz performances). Building on the work of Andrea Most and others, I argue that the increasing popularity of “belt” discourse among Broadway critics, performers, and other professionals after World War II was closely connected with broader efforts to erase traces of ethnic heritage from what advocates now wanted to understand as a unifying, “American” theatrical form. To illustrate this, I focus on the mediatization of Broadway diva Ethel Merman’s voice in journalism, television appearances, and the musicals written for her in the postwar years. Drawing on archival sources held at the Museum of the City of New York, I overview the history of Merman’s vocal reception, from early representations of her as a “coon shouter” to the first applications of the term “belt” to her singing. I then explore how the plot, vocal writing, and performance of musicals like Styne, Sondheim, and Laurents’s 1959 musical Gypsy staged Merman’s newly minted “belt” voice as a piece of “classic,” and racially unmarked, Americana—a conception that remains with us today.
“Carolina Cotton’s Swinging Yodels and 1940s Okie Womanhood”
Stephanie Vander Wel (University at Buffalo)
In California’s1940s dancehalls, Carolina Cotton emerged as a formidable vocalist of
leading western swing bands, such as Spade Cooley’s Orchestra and Bob Will and his
Texas Playboys. What made Cotton’s musical performances especially striking were the
ways she expanded upon the image and musical idioms of the singing cowgirl. She
developed a virtuosic yodeling style that matched the rhythmic language and
improvisatory nature of western swing with her yodels functioning like an instrumental
take off solo within the ensemble. By examining specific songs and film footage of
Carolina Cotton performing with Spade Cooley’s Orchestra, I underline the ways she
placed the female voice at the center of western swing, a musical style usually associated
with male bandleaders and instrumentalists.
Dressed as a cowgirl with a southern stage name, Carolina Cotton’s musical
performances resonated with a specific audience of displaced migrants from the southern
plains and the Southwest. Labeled as Okies, white migrants in California faced a vitriolic
anti-migrant campaign during the Depression era. With the outbreak of Word War II,
however, the same Okies, especially women, became sought-after laborers for the
defense production plants located in urban centers like San Francisco or Los Angeles.
This paper connects Cotton’s musical image to the changing circumstances of migration,
place, and gender in 1940s California. While Carolina Cotton contributed to the glamour
of western swing in California ballrooms, she offered versions of womanhood that helped
to rescue Okie woman from Depression-era stereotypes while underscoring the uneasy
relationship between Okie womanhood and middle-class, California society.
Session 3: Forms, Structure, and Beyond
“Bound for Display: The Interior/Exterior Dualities of Monteverdi’s Nymph”
Seth Coluzzi (Colgate University)
Monteverdi’s Lamento della ninfa (1638) maintains a prominent place in the
performance repertory and in scholarly literature today for its display of sheer emotional
power in the soprano voice, and for the wealth of interpretative possibilities that spring from
its mixture of genere rappresentativo, male chorus, through-composed madrigal, and
descending-tetrachord ostinato. These features have inspired a range of semi-dramatic and
even cinematic realizations, as well as numerous investigations into the work’s implications
of genre, gender, musical/textual form, narrativity, and lineage.
While previous studies have offered various explanations of how the ostinato, musical
form, and interactions of the voices portray the Nymph’s isolation and passion, they have
overlooked other key aspects of the piece, including its physical presentation in Monteverdi’s
Eighth Book of madrigals, its manner of performance (as suggested by the partbooks), and its
expressive integration of text and large-scale structure. This paper peers deeply into the
printed sources and into the music itself to reveal new dimensions of Monteverdi’s Lamento.
The study focuses on three principal perspectives: the unusual layout of the parts in the
Eighth Book (together with the composer’s performance instructions), the work’s modal–
structural design and the roles of the individual voices therein, and what these source and
analytical findings tell us about how the lament functioned in the intimate performance setting
of the early-modern chamber. The results enhance our understanding of this well-known
piece, its means of expression, and contemporary perceptions of female song, while raising
new questions about the lament’s realization in performances today.
“Orlando at Play: The Games of Il palazzo incantato (1642)”
Roger Freitas (Eastman School of Music)
In the penultimate scene of Giulio Rospigliosi and Luigi Rossi’s Palazzo incantato, based on incidents from Orlando furioso, the characters unexpectedly call a halt to the plot and proceed to play a series of parlor games. More specifically, Orlando challenges the others to “retrieve their forfeits,” making this the traditional conclusion of a game, when those who have played poorly can redeem themselves with a show of wit or talent. We hear riddles solved, questioni answered, stornelli improvised, and (naturally) songs sung.
I argue that this scene frames the opera, the first patronized by Antonio Barberini, in an unexpected and heretofore unremarked way. If the published argomento (and much scholarship) describes the work as an allegory of the Human Soul freed by Reason from the delusions of Love, this scene contends rather that it has all been a spirited game. Indeed, a close reading of the libretto, in light of contemporary game treatises (the Bargagli), recent scholarship on Renaissance games (Riccò, Schleuse), and the foundational work of Murata and Hammond, suggests that notwithstanding its length and theatrical setting, this opera can more fruitfully be considered a modified chamber entertainment. The argomento aside, Rospigliosi’s libretto treats the theater as a salon, replicating the intimacy and playful eroticism—and perhaps therefore episodic structure—of an evening’s private entertainment. Antonio thus delights his audience like guests at an elite gathering, offering them not a moral lesson but a work that, like so many chamber cantatas, revels in the pains and pleasures of love.
“The Art of The Extended Refrain”
Gordon Root (SUNY Fredonia)
When guitarist Tampa Red and pianist Georgia Tom recorded their famous hokum blues
song “Tight Like That” in 1928, they could scarcely imagine the indirect influence it
would have on later generations. Possibly due to its hook in bar five, the TLT model and
its variants fueled many commercially driven early rock and roll songs, including Bill
Haley’s “Rock Around The Clock” (1955), Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” (1956) and
even The Beatles “Day Tripper” (1965). Beginning in the mid-sixties, countless songs
(particularly Motown hits such as “Shop Around,” “Tears of a Clown,” and “My Girl”)
began to utilize the extended refrain outside a twelve-bar- blues context. Thus, by the
mid-sixties a variety of refrain strategies became operative. In “The Art of the Extended
Refrain,” I explore each of these strategies along a continuum that features refrain-like
formal modules at one end, and chorus-like modules at the other. The standard single-line
refrain, heard in songs such as “Just One of Those Things,” “Winter Wonderland,” and
“From Me to You,” lies at one end of the continuum as the least ambiguous refrain-type,
while a design I describe as the “portmanteau refrain” lies at the other end of the
spectrum as a close relative of the chorus. In this paper, I not only offer necessary and
sufficient conditions for the standard refrain and chorus, but I also explore the properties
and aesthetic effects of each kind of extended refrain. Finally, I investigate some of the
larger programmatic and cultural significance of each extended refrain-type.
Session 5: Media Contexts
“More than the CBC: The Elmer Eisler Singers, Shirley Verett-Carter, and Igor Stravinsky
in Toronto, 1961-1962”
Kimberly Francis (University of Guelph)
In August 1961, Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft began discussions with John Roberts, a producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, to bring Stravinsky to Toronto, Canada. By the end of 1962, Stravinsky produced several recordings with the CBC symphony orchestra, and had become deeply enamoured with the Elmer Eisler Singers. Indeed, the Eisler choir was the last to record Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, and later, Stravinsky would become the ensemble’s patron. In addition to the Elmer Eisler Singers, during his Toronto concerts Stravinsky collaborated with a number of unique artists, including actor John Horton, and mezzo-soprano Shirley Verett-Carter. These final concerts and recordings have been largely overlooked in the current Stravinsky literature, though the details of Stravinsky’s activities at this time provide unique insights into his late career and the artists with whom he collaborated in the last decade of his life.
Turning to John Roberts’s archives, now housed at the University of Calgary, I reconstruct the details of the 1962 performances, with particular attention given to the performers involved. By examining the process through which they were engaged, the recordings they produced, and the reception they received, I reconsider the embodied politics of the performers who appeared alongside Stravinsky on these concerts. Connecting this evidence back to cultural life in Toronto at the beginning of the 1960s, I argue for the forging of new narratives about the nature of the city’s artistic identity at this time and for a more nuanced understanding of Stravinsky’s late career.
“Sound and Meaning on Radio in John Cage's The City Wears a Slouch Hat (1942)”
John Green (Eastman School of Music)
On May 31, 1942, radio listeners nationwide tuned in to their local CBS station and heard an
opening sonic salvo from tin cans, woodblock, muted gong, and ratchet. The narrator soon declared,
“Today the Workshop presents The City Wears a Slouch Hat by Kenneth Patchen. The score is for
sound orchestra by John Cage” and audiences were suddenly thrust into a noisy urban soundscape.
Cage himself would position the positive reception of this radio play as a turning point in his career and
impetus for relocating from Chicago to New York City.
Yet, Cage scholars have neglected to contextualize this work in relation to radio drama
composition more broadly. There has also been correspondingly little analysis of Cage's score, which I
suggest tactically signals dramatic actions, a concept historian Neil Verma refers to as “scenic
referentiality,” while also creating a texture in which music and sound effect are interwoven. Utilizing a
close reading of Cage's compositional techniques, I argue that Slouch Hat offers a rare view of the
composer's relationship to textual and dramatic setting, one that places the work among debates over
sound and meaning on contemporary radio.
My analysis will also draw upon my own archival research with unpublished correspondence
from Northwestern University's John Cage Collection, the value of which lies beyond the composer's
own writings: letters sent to CBS from radio listeners nationwide in reaction to the premiere of Slouch
Hat. While many listeners were delighted with Cage's contribution to challenging conventions of the
radio play genre, others found Cage's music too extreme, often employing references to insanity or
mental health generally. This correspondence shows how audiences engaged with and debated about
the avant-garde, even in unexpected places such as a CBS radio drama; each listener, regardless of their
approval or disapproval, participated in a broader debate about sound's role in the construction of plot
and drama. By attending to the context surrounding Cage's radio play, including the reception by a
well-read but popular audience, we are afforded a unique view of broadcast's role in shaping the
production and reception of music on and for radio.
Session 6: Representing Bodies Through Music
“Representing Difference in Popular Music: Alienation and Disability in an Italian Setting of Masters’s Spoon River Anthology”
Matteo Magarotto (Cornell University)
Studies of how music narrates disability have focused on structural parallels between non-
normative identities and deviant musical features (Lerner and Straus 2006, Straus 2016). In this
paper, I draw from topic theory and “markedness” (Mirka 2014, Hatten 1994) to analyze a different
approach to the representation of disability, with a case study at the intersection of American and
Italian culture. Fabrizio De André (1940–1999), arguably the preeminent Italian songwriter, was
a spokesman for marginalized people. His album Non al denaro non all’amore né al cielo (1971,
with Nicola Piovani) is a setting of poems from Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology
(1916), which explored the lives and miseries of American villagers at the turn of the twentieth
century.
I argue that the album’s stylistic topics and marked musical devices, through their cultural
associations, assign Otherness to the disabled and alienated characters portrayed in the poems.
Othering style topics in the album include player-piano music for an idealist physician, Klezmer
and psychedelia for an eccentric optician, and the lament topic for a blasphemer. Mode, harmony,
or instrumentation also “mark” a madman, a dwarf, a man affected by heart disease, a secluded
chemist, and a musician. However, De André-Piovani’s treatment of these style topics elevates the
album’s characters, who, as in Masters, embody core human experiences. This paper proposes
that, whereas modernist music in Straus’s words “manifests itself as disability,” popular music can
represent disability and difference by reclaiming musical styles historically associated with the
Other.
“Strategizing the Female Body: Charlotte Moorman’s Sky Kiss”
Rachael Lemna (Eastman School of Music)
Throughout her career, cellist Charlotte Moorman’s radical and unorthodox
performances, such as playing the cello topless and wearing a bra embedded with illuminated
televisions, drew attention to her gender and aimed to challenge audiences’ traditional notions of
art. Yet, while scholars have focused on the provocative and sexually charged reception of
Moorman’s experimental performances, few have considered the strategies she used to position
her body as a medium of healing and spirituality.
Outside the Sydney Opera House on April 11, 1976, Moorman’s performance of Jim
McWilliams’ Sky Kiss called for her to float in the air with the aid of large, colorful helium
balloons while playing her cello. The freeing sensation of flight in front of an audience gave
Moorman a momentary release from her physical struggles back on land, most importantly her
diagnosis of breast cancer and consequent mastectomy.
Utilizing performance footage and unpublished archival correspondences, I argue that
Sky Kiss provided both Moorman and audiences with a therapeutic and escapist experience,
allowing Moorman to find acceptance for her private affairs in a public manner. My analysis
develops theater and dance historian Sally Bane’s concept of the ‘effervescent body,’ which
emphasizes the performative portrayal of topics such as procreation and death, to demonstrate
this underrepresented aspect of Moorman’s artistic philosophy. This reading of Sky Kiss calls
attention to restorative and holistic interpretations of experimental music while challenging the
provocative analyses that often undermine the profundity of these performances.
Session 1: The 1960s: Space Age and War
“The First International Webern Festival; or, It Happened at the World's Fair”
David H. Miller (Cornell University)
In an April 1962 article previewing the First International Webern Festival, musicologist Hans Moldenhauer promised that Webern’s music would one day be known as “the music of the space age.” Moldenhauer’s words were carefully chosen. The Webern Festival was set to take place in Seattle at the same time as the World’s Fair, an event so focused on futuristic technologies that its central building was named the Space Needle. By evoking the aesthetic of the World’s Fair, then, Moldenhauer sought to elevate the profile of the Webern Festival.
Yet the two “W.F.s” made for an awkward pairing. The opening night of the Webern Festival was held on the grounds of the World’s Fair and featured the world premiere of Webern’s Im Sommerwind. An orchestral tone poem composed in 1904, Im Sommerwind had been unknown until its discovery by Moldenhauer in 1960. Far from space-age music, Im Sommerwind’s lush textures and sweeping gestures revealed a young Webern rooted in late nineteenth-century Romanticism. The work’s nature-worshipping program, furthermore, contrasted sharply with the fair’s technological urbanism. The remainder of the Webern Festival took place on the forested campus of the University of Washington, a site better suited to the premieres of several other early Webern works that followed. But the tension between the Webern Festival and the World’s Fair was an indication of the shape that Webern reception would take in the ensuing decades. For some, Webern was the last of the Romantics; for others, he was the first space-age composer.
“A Crisis of American Identity: Elie Siegmeister’s Vietnam War Works”
April Pauline Morris (University of Western Ontario)
The Vietnam War period was a fraught time in American history, during which strongly
held and antithetical opinions about American involvement in the conflict prompted widespread
social unrest and protest. Media coverage of the brutal realities of wartime and suspicions about
the government’s motivations led many citizens to question America’s exceptionalism and
position of moral high ground. Many musical works from the 1960s and 1970s reflect the social
unrest of the period; both Arnold (1991) and Kinsella (2005) have pointed to changes in the
nature of war compositions written about this conflict. However, the existing scholarship on
Vietnam War works fails to investigate this repertoire in the context of changing conceptions of
national identity.
In this paper I demonstrate that Elie Siegmeister’s The Face of War and “Evil,” both
composed in 1967, are not only provocative works of protest to the Vietnam War, but also
provide insight into this crisis of American national identity. I analyze these works as well as
Siegmeister’s commentary on them through the lens of musical Americanism, demonstrating
ways in which the composer’s use of musical style, social spirit, and national ideals reveals
multifaceted and paradoxical representations of what it meant to be American. I argue that these
two compositions present an American perspective that is very much a product of its time; a
perspective that is both tied to and eschews an earlier conception of American national identity
that has been fractured and tainted by America’s role in the Vietnam War.
Session 2: American Women's Voices
“Ethel Merman, Gypsy, and the Birth of the Broadway ‘Belt’”
John Kapusta (Eastman School of Music)
Today scholars and fans alike recognize the so-called Broadway “belt”—the clarion, high-lying women’s vocal practice—as an icon of the Broadway stage. Despite its centrality to US musical theater production and reception, though, the history of this now ubiquitous term has gone underanalyzed. Though the tradition of “belt”-like theatrical singing in the United States can be traced at least to the early 1900s, the term “belt” only emerged in theatrical contexts around midcentury (after it had been previously used to describe ebullient jazz performances). Building on the work of Andrea Most and others, I argue that the increasing popularity of “belt” discourse among Broadway critics, performers, and other professionals after World War II was closely connected with broader efforts to erase traces of ethnic heritage from what advocates now wanted to understand as a unifying, “American” theatrical form. To illustrate this, I focus on the mediatization of Broadway diva Ethel Merman’s voice in journalism, television appearances, and the musicals written for her in the postwar years. Drawing on archival sources held at the Museum of the City of New York, I overview the history of Merman’s vocal reception, from early representations of her as a “coon shouter” to the first applications of the term “belt” to her singing. I then explore how the plot, vocal writing, and performance of musicals like Styne, Sondheim, and Laurents’s 1959 musical Gypsy staged Merman’s newly minted “belt” voice as a piece of “classic,” and racially unmarked, Americana—a conception that remains with us today.
“Carolina Cotton’s Swinging Yodels and 1940s Okie Womanhood”
Stephanie Vander Wel (University at Buffalo)
In California’s1940s dancehalls, Carolina Cotton emerged as a formidable vocalist of
leading western swing bands, such as Spade Cooley’s Orchestra and Bob Will and his
Texas Playboys. What made Cotton’s musical performances especially striking were the
ways she expanded upon the image and musical idioms of the singing cowgirl. She
developed a virtuosic yodeling style that matched the rhythmic language and
improvisatory nature of western swing with her yodels functioning like an instrumental
take off solo within the ensemble. By examining specific songs and film footage of
Carolina Cotton performing with Spade Cooley’s Orchestra, I underline the ways she
placed the female voice at the center of western swing, a musical style usually associated
with male bandleaders and instrumentalists.
Dressed as a cowgirl with a southern stage name, Carolina Cotton’s musical
performances resonated with a specific audience of displaced migrants from the southern
plains and the Southwest. Labeled as Okies, white migrants in California faced a vitriolic
anti-migrant campaign during the Depression era. With the outbreak of Word War II,
however, the same Okies, especially women, became sought-after laborers for the
defense production plants located in urban centers like San Francisco or Los Angeles.
This paper connects Cotton’s musical image to the changing circumstances of migration,
place, and gender in 1940s California. While Carolina Cotton contributed to the glamour
of western swing in California ballrooms, she offered versions of womanhood that helped
to rescue Okie woman from Depression-era stereotypes while underscoring the uneasy
relationship between Okie womanhood and middle-class, California society.
Session 3: Forms, Structure, and Beyond
“Bound for Display: The Interior/Exterior Dualities of Monteverdi’s Nymph”
Seth Coluzzi (Colgate University)
Monteverdi’s Lamento della ninfa (1638) maintains a prominent place in the
performance repertory and in scholarly literature today for its display of sheer emotional
power in the soprano voice, and for the wealth of interpretative possibilities that spring from
its mixture of genere rappresentativo, male chorus, through-composed madrigal, and
descending-tetrachord ostinato. These features have inspired a range of semi-dramatic and
even cinematic realizations, as well as numerous investigations into the work’s implications
of genre, gender, musical/textual form, narrativity, and lineage.
While previous studies have offered various explanations of how the ostinato, musical
form, and interactions of the voices portray the Nymph’s isolation and passion, they have
overlooked other key aspects of the piece, including its physical presentation in Monteverdi’s
Eighth Book of madrigals, its manner of performance (as suggested by the partbooks), and its
expressive integration of text and large-scale structure. This paper peers deeply into the
printed sources and into the music itself to reveal new dimensions of Monteverdi’s Lamento.
The study focuses on three principal perspectives: the unusual layout of the parts in the
Eighth Book (together with the composer’s performance instructions), the work’s modal–
structural design and the roles of the individual voices therein, and what these source and
analytical findings tell us about how the lament functioned in the intimate performance setting
of the early-modern chamber. The results enhance our understanding of this well-known
piece, its means of expression, and contemporary perceptions of female song, while raising
new questions about the lament’s realization in performances today.
“Orlando at Play: The Games of Il palazzo incantato (1642)”
Roger Freitas (Eastman School of Music)
In the penultimate scene of Giulio Rospigliosi and Luigi Rossi’s Palazzo incantato, based on incidents from Orlando furioso, the characters unexpectedly call a halt to the plot and proceed to play a series of parlor games. More specifically, Orlando challenges the others to “retrieve their forfeits,” making this the traditional conclusion of a game, when those who have played poorly can redeem themselves with a show of wit or talent. We hear riddles solved, questioni answered, stornelli improvised, and (naturally) songs sung.
I argue that this scene frames the opera, the first patronized by Antonio Barberini, in an unexpected and heretofore unremarked way. If the published argomento (and much scholarship) describes the work as an allegory of the Human Soul freed by Reason from the delusions of Love, this scene contends rather that it has all been a spirited game. Indeed, a close reading of the libretto, in light of contemporary game treatises (the Bargagli), recent scholarship on Renaissance games (Riccò, Schleuse), and the foundational work of Murata and Hammond, suggests that notwithstanding its length and theatrical setting, this opera can more fruitfully be considered a modified chamber entertainment. The argomento aside, Rospigliosi’s libretto treats the theater as a salon, replicating the intimacy and playful eroticism—and perhaps therefore episodic structure—of an evening’s private entertainment. Antonio thus delights his audience like guests at an elite gathering, offering them not a moral lesson but a work that, like so many chamber cantatas, revels in the pains and pleasures of love.
“The Art of The Extended Refrain”
Gordon Root (SUNY Fredonia)
When guitarist Tampa Red and pianist Georgia Tom recorded their famous hokum blues
song “Tight Like That” in 1928, they could scarcely imagine the indirect influence it
would have on later generations. Possibly due to its hook in bar five, the TLT model and
its variants fueled many commercially driven early rock and roll songs, including Bill
Haley’s “Rock Around The Clock” (1955), Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” (1956) and
even The Beatles “Day Tripper” (1965). Beginning in the mid-sixties, countless songs
(particularly Motown hits such as “Shop Around,” “Tears of a Clown,” and “My Girl”)
began to utilize the extended refrain outside a twelve-bar- blues context. Thus, by the
mid-sixties a variety of refrain strategies became operative. In “The Art of the Extended
Refrain,” I explore each of these strategies along a continuum that features refrain-like
formal modules at one end, and chorus-like modules at the other. The standard single-line
refrain, heard in songs such as “Just One of Those Things,” “Winter Wonderland,” and
“From Me to You,” lies at one end of the continuum as the least ambiguous refrain-type,
while a design I describe as the “portmanteau refrain” lies at the other end of the
spectrum as a close relative of the chorus. In this paper, I not only offer necessary and
sufficient conditions for the standard refrain and chorus, but I also explore the properties
and aesthetic effects of each kind of extended refrain. Finally, I investigate some of the
larger programmatic and cultural significance of each extended refrain-type.
Session 5: Media Contexts
“More than the CBC: The Elmer Eisler Singers, Shirley Verett-Carter, and Igor Stravinsky
in Toronto, 1961-1962”
Kimberly Francis (University of Guelph)
In August 1961, Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft began discussions with John Roberts, a producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, to bring Stravinsky to Toronto, Canada. By the end of 1962, Stravinsky produced several recordings with the CBC symphony orchestra, and had become deeply enamoured with the Elmer Eisler Singers. Indeed, the Eisler choir was the last to record Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, and later, Stravinsky would become the ensemble’s patron. In addition to the Elmer Eisler Singers, during his Toronto concerts Stravinsky collaborated with a number of unique artists, including actor John Horton, and mezzo-soprano Shirley Verett-Carter. These final concerts and recordings have been largely overlooked in the current Stravinsky literature, though the details of Stravinsky’s activities at this time provide unique insights into his late career and the artists with whom he collaborated in the last decade of his life.
Turning to John Roberts’s archives, now housed at the University of Calgary, I reconstruct the details of the 1962 performances, with particular attention given to the performers involved. By examining the process through which they were engaged, the recordings they produced, and the reception they received, I reconsider the embodied politics of the performers who appeared alongside Stravinsky on these concerts. Connecting this evidence back to cultural life in Toronto at the beginning of the 1960s, I argue for the forging of new narratives about the nature of the city’s artistic identity at this time and for a more nuanced understanding of Stravinsky’s late career.
“Sound and Meaning on Radio in John Cage's The City Wears a Slouch Hat (1942)”
John Green (Eastman School of Music)
On May 31, 1942, radio listeners nationwide tuned in to their local CBS station and heard an
opening sonic salvo from tin cans, woodblock, muted gong, and ratchet. The narrator soon declared,
“Today the Workshop presents The City Wears a Slouch Hat by Kenneth Patchen. The score is for
sound orchestra by John Cage” and audiences were suddenly thrust into a noisy urban soundscape.
Cage himself would position the positive reception of this radio play as a turning point in his career and
impetus for relocating from Chicago to New York City.
Yet, Cage scholars have neglected to contextualize this work in relation to radio drama
composition more broadly. There has also been correspondingly little analysis of Cage's score, which I
suggest tactically signals dramatic actions, a concept historian Neil Verma refers to as “scenic
referentiality,” while also creating a texture in which music and sound effect are interwoven. Utilizing a
close reading of Cage's compositional techniques, I argue that Slouch Hat offers a rare view of the
composer's relationship to textual and dramatic setting, one that places the work among debates over
sound and meaning on contemporary radio.
My analysis will also draw upon my own archival research with unpublished correspondence
from Northwestern University's John Cage Collection, the value of which lies beyond the composer's
own writings: letters sent to CBS from radio listeners nationwide in reaction to the premiere of Slouch
Hat. While many listeners were delighted with Cage's contribution to challenging conventions of the
radio play genre, others found Cage's music too extreme, often employing references to insanity or
mental health generally. This correspondence shows how audiences engaged with and debated about
the avant-garde, even in unexpected places such as a CBS radio drama; each listener, regardless of their
approval or disapproval, participated in a broader debate about sound's role in the construction of plot
and drama. By attending to the context surrounding Cage's radio play, including the reception by a
well-read but popular audience, we are afforded a unique view of broadcast's role in shaping the
production and reception of music on and for radio.
Session 6: Representing Bodies Through Music
“Representing Difference in Popular Music: Alienation and Disability in an Italian Setting of Masters’s Spoon River Anthology”
Matteo Magarotto (Cornell University)
Studies of how music narrates disability have focused on structural parallels between non-
normative identities and deviant musical features (Lerner and Straus 2006, Straus 2016). In this
paper, I draw from topic theory and “markedness” (Mirka 2014, Hatten 1994) to analyze a different
approach to the representation of disability, with a case study at the intersection of American and
Italian culture. Fabrizio De André (1940–1999), arguably the preeminent Italian songwriter, was
a spokesman for marginalized people. His album Non al denaro non all’amore né al cielo (1971,
with Nicola Piovani) is a setting of poems from Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology
(1916), which explored the lives and miseries of American villagers at the turn of the twentieth
century.
I argue that the album’s stylistic topics and marked musical devices, through their cultural
associations, assign Otherness to the disabled and alienated characters portrayed in the poems.
Othering style topics in the album include player-piano music for an idealist physician, Klezmer
and psychedelia for an eccentric optician, and the lament topic for a blasphemer. Mode, harmony,
or instrumentation also “mark” a madman, a dwarf, a man affected by heart disease, a secluded
chemist, and a musician. However, De André-Piovani’s treatment of these style topics elevates the
album’s characters, who, as in Masters, embody core human experiences. This paper proposes
that, whereas modernist music in Straus’s words “manifests itself as disability,” popular music can
represent disability and difference by reclaiming musical styles historically associated with the
Other.
“Strategizing the Female Body: Charlotte Moorman’s Sky Kiss”
Rachael Lemna (Eastman School of Music)
Throughout her career, cellist Charlotte Moorman’s radical and unorthodox
performances, such as playing the cello topless and wearing a bra embedded with illuminated
televisions, drew attention to her gender and aimed to challenge audiences’ traditional notions of
art. Yet, while scholars have focused on the provocative and sexually charged reception of
Moorman’s experimental performances, few have considered the strategies she used to position
her body as a medium of healing and spirituality.
Outside the Sydney Opera House on April 11, 1976, Moorman’s performance of Jim
McWilliams’ Sky Kiss called for her to float in the air with the aid of large, colorful helium
balloons while playing her cello. The freeing sensation of flight in front of an audience gave
Moorman a momentary release from her physical struggles back on land, most importantly her
diagnosis of breast cancer and consequent mastectomy.
Utilizing performance footage and unpublished archival correspondences, I argue that
Sky Kiss provided both Moorman and audiences with a therapeutic and escapist experience,
allowing Moorman to find acceptance for her private affairs in a public manner. My analysis
develops theater and dance historian Sally Bane’s concept of the ‘effervescent body,’ which
emphasizes the performative portrayal of topics such as procreation and death, to demonstrate
this underrepresented aspect of Moorman’s artistic philosophy. This reading of Sky Kiss calls
attention to restorative and holistic interpretations of experimental music while challenging the
provocative analyses that often undermine the profundity of these performances.
