Chapter Meeting April 30-May 1 2016, SUNY Potsdam

Spring 2016 meeting
AMS - NYSSL Chapter
Crane School of Music, SUNY Potsdam

SATURDAY APRIL 30, 2016

9:00 - 10:00 Rethinking Performance Contexts and Texts

Heinrich Schütz’s Musical Gift to the Wolfenbüttel Court: What the Partbooks Tell Us
Gregory Johnston, University of Toronto Heinrich Schütz’s Musical Gift to the Wolfenbüttel Court: What the Partbooks Tell Us
Gregory Johnston, University of Toronto

The Dresden Hofkapellmeister Heinrich Schütz enjoyed an enduring relationship with the court of August der Jüngere, Herzog zu Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. He advised the duke on a wide array of musical matters as Senior Kapellmeister in absentia. As a gesture of appreciation Schütz donated copies of his printed music to the duke, and in a letter dated 10 January 1664 expressed his profound gratitude to August for according these works a place in the ducal library. Schütz not only enriched the collection through this donation, he erected something of a lasting memorial to himself in a library he rightly described as “supremely famous through all Europe.”
A contemporary but undated index of the items sent by the composer was discovered in the Herzog August Bibliothek by Horst Walter in 1973, allowing us to see what was sent initially by the composer and what was added later. Some of the partbooks and scores are in pristine condition, whereas others contain corrections, erasures, glued and pinned-in correction, emendations, as well as handwritten notational and textual additions. These alterations are commented on by Walter but he concludes ultimately and unequivocally that “the prints exhibit no traces of usage whatsoever – as if they were never used for performance”. On the basis of the evidence in the partbooks, the present paper challenges this notion and considers further what the layout of shared partbooks and coordinated page turns tell us about ensemble, placement of performers, and specific details of Schütz’s understanding of performance.

Directorial Influence at the Paris Opéra: The Case of Devismes du Valgay
Annalise Smith, Cornell University Directorial Influence at the Paris Opéra: The Case of Devismes du Valgay
Annalise Smith, Cornell University

Anne-Pierre-Jacques Devismes du Valgay began what was to be a twelve-year tenure as director of the Académie Royale de Musique in April 1778. By March 1780, having incurred massive debt, he was removed from the position by Royal decree. Budgetary failures, however, were not the sole cause of his downfall. Devismes had attempted to institute numerous reforms at the Opéra, including alterations to the hall, company membership and salary, and the repertoire that appeared on stage, notably inviting a troupe of Italian actors to perform opera buffa. Swift opposition to these changes arose both inside and outside the Opéra. A supervisory committee appointed in February 1779 was unable to stem the hostility directed towards Devismes, nor repair the effects of his financial mismanagement. Following Devismes’ departure, the king replaced him with a committee made up of Opéra employees and performers, ensuring that no single director would ever again wield such controversial authority.
Discussions of French opera generally focus on individual composers and works as drivers of innovation. In comparison, the directors of the Opéra may seem little more than bureaucratic figureheads. Yet Devismes’ tenure, though short and unpopular, illustrates the far-reaching and tangible impact of a director determined to reshape an aging institution. By examining Devismes’ proposed reforms and their reception, this paper will demonstrate the ways in which the director could influence not only the repertoire and daily operations of the Opéra, but also its identity in the eyes of the public and the artists who created it.

10:00-11:00 Negotiating the Past and the Place

Fado and Female Azorean Immigrants
Anne Briggs, Wichita State University Fado and Female Azorean Immigrants
Anne Briggs, Wichita State University

There is an important paradox built into the structure of Portuguese fado. The genre is defined by a sense of saudade—longing, nostalgia, soulfulness, and heartache—but also deliberately lacks a solidified origin narrative; it is a nostalgic genre without a past. This circumstance has important consequences for the genre itself, resulting in constructed, highly gendered narratives surrounding the genre and its performers. But even more importantly, this circumstance means that the process of formulating folk traditions is self-consciously and continually unfolding in the fado community; members invent the genre’s past as a means of negotiating their present—an impulse especially pressing for emigrant groups constructing and sorting through new identities abroad. As a lens onto fado and its communities, this paper explores the genre’s origin narratives as formulated by Azorean-American immigrants during the twentieth century. Estellie Smith has already explored the often-overlooked leadership roles of female Azoreans in the immigration process, and Lila Ellen Gray has examined the ways fado origin narratives and gender coexists in an intertwined mythos, particularly in Lisbon. This paper however, will focus primarily on the complex gender expectations in fado narratives to reveal the complex agency of female fadistas in Azorean-American communities. Such an examination illuminates female Azorean immigrants as powerful agents in negotiating a past and integrating into the present; in essence as a way for female Azorean immigrants to comfort their families with something familiar in a sea of unfamiliarity.

"Shattered Image": Appalachian White-Trash Femininities in the Songs of Dolly Parton
Lydia Hamessley, Hamilton College "Shattered Image": Appalachian White-Trash Femininities in the Songs of Dolly Parton
Lydia Hamessley, Hamilton College

Dolly Parton, a “Backwoods Barbie” and, in her words, a “white-trash princess,” explains the genesis of her iconic image. As a child she was intrigued by a local woman with big hair, red fingernails, and heavy makeup. Her mother’s response: “she ain’t nothin’ but trash,” and Dolly recalls that the woman was probably the town prostitute. Dolly’s fascination with this figure, this white-trash woman, has resulted in a number of songs, among them “The Bridge,” “The Bargain Store,” “Down From Dover,” “Mountain Angel,” “Shattered Image.” In these songs, Dolly creates images of women who are essentially good (i.e., not yet trash), but who find themselves, often as a result of pregnancy outside of marriage, shunned by their families, alone and driven to madness or suicide – women who have become trash. Dolly’s songs evoke our sympathy, not derision, for these women. However, the songs do not embody the empowerment evident in Gretchen Wilson’s “redneck woman” or the biting accusation of male complicity in creating Kitty Wells’ “honky tonk angel.” Nor do Dolly’s fallen women come to us through a classic country music sound. Dolly’s musical style, of course, runs the gamut from country to pop. But there is also a strain of traditional Appalachian mountain music in her sound that is especially evident in these songs. I argue that her use of a mountain style here – modal, ballad-like, fiddle-based – engenders our sympathies, but keeps the women rooted in a mountain culture that Dolly presents as unforgiving and often cruel and deadly.

1:30-2:30 Physical/Spiritual

Human Perception and Transcendence in Maeterlinck and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (Act III scene 3)
François de Médicis, Université de Montréal Human Perception and Transcendence in Maeterlinck and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (Act III scene 3)
François de Médicis, Université de Montréal

This study addresses the evocation of human perception, the hierarchy of the senses and their role in the subject's ascent to transcendence, both in Maurice Maeterlinck’s play, Pelléas et Mélisande, and in Claude Debussy’s opera. In act III scene 3, Pelléas delivers a striking monologue which describes in real time the various stimuli that uplift him at a terrace in the open air: odours (grass, wet roses), sounds (bells, kids running down to the beach), passing of time, sight (Mélisande in a tower). In contrast to the intimidation of Golaud’s homicidal impulses in the castle vaults (scene 2), Pelléas reaches here an experience of transcendence as he witnesses the dazzling sight of Mélisande perched at the top of a tower in the full radiance of midday sun. Maeterlinck, whose thought was immersed in idealist philosophy (Gorceix 2005), traces a progression that culminates with sight, following Plato’s hierarchy of the senses (Timaeus). Moreover, far from being depreciated, the experience of the world’s beauty through the senses functions as a springboard toward the absolute, in accordance with plotinian thought (Enneads). Debussy, who assuredly knew Edouard Dujardin’s experiments with the interior monologue (Huebner 2013), chooses not to illustrate musically the concrete world, the objective phenomena that stimulate Pelléas’ senses, but instead, focuses on the mental images, always in flux, of the young man. He conceives a very original texture, in which different musical strata symbolize various channels of perception, and allow him to represent the perceptions’ flux and shifts in emphasis.

Religious Music in Helen Bonny’s Typology of Music for LSD Psychotherapy
Stephen Lett, University of Michigan Religious Music in Helen Bonny’s Typology of Music for LSD Psychotherapy
Stephen Lett, University of Michigan

In the early 1970s, Helen Bonny (1921–2010), developed a widely practiced form of therapy, Guided Imagery and Music (GIM), based on her experience practicing LSD psychotherapy. While music therapists frequently cite these origins, scholars have yet to study how Bonny harnessed the conceptual strands surrounding this therapy into a systematized approach to music’s use in LSD therapy—an approach that would then serve as the theoretical basis for GIM. This paper lays the preliminary groundwork for such a study by situating her writings on the use of “religious music” in LSD psychotherapy in relation to contemporaneous discourses surrounding alcoholism, religion, and spirituality.
This paper centers on archival materials from Bonny’s LSD research in which she elaborates a typology of music and offers guidelines for its use in sessions. Of special importance in her typology of music is religious music. Following conceptual approaches present in Alcoholics Anonymous, psychedelic research, and humanist/transpersonal psychology, Bonny understands religion in two senses. In the first, “religious” signifies the various institutions of religion. In the second, it refers to an ineffable, affective power frequently called “spiritual.” In this second sense, religious music refers to the “spirit” that inheres in the music itself—a hidden or esoteric but very real quality that animates not only music, but all the world. Her commitment to the therapeutic power of spirit, I argue, must be read in the context of Western esotericism—a heterogeneous intellectual tradition that continues to inform many psychotherapeutic practices.

2:30-3:30 Silenced

The Secret Nightingale: when utterance and silence co-exist. Susan Metcalfe-Casals and the genesis of En Sourdine
Silva Lazo, Cornell University The Secret Nightingale: when utterance and silence co-exist. Susan Metcalfe-Casals and the genesis of En Sourdine
Silva Lazo, Cornell University

The overwhelming presumption about songs is that they are meant to be sung and shared. In the curious case of En Sourdine (1904) composed by Pau Casals (1876–1973) we see an exquisite discrepancy: a love song which is both romantic utterance and yet muteness. The paradoxical genesis of En Sourdine is due to Casals’ then secretive relationship with a prominent lieder singer, Susan Metcalfe (later Mrs. Casals), during their performance engagements in and around New York City circa 1904. In “Musicology for Art Historians”, Jonathan Hicks tell us that the discipline of musicology relentlessly promoted the association of “composerly authority with a masculine subject.” This focus obfuscated many aspects of compositional impetus and relegated the role of other historical agents to oblivion, particularly “singer, instrumentalist, patron, etc.—that women have most often been in positions to perform.” En Sourdine (Muted), an art song that appears in Casals’ catalog significantly without a date, reveals the deeply personal nature of his vocal works that memorialize events, feelings and persons very dear to him. The musicological analysis of intertextual sources and compositional settings of En Sourdine, in the context of Casals and Metcalfe’s relationship, reveal the function of song as an intimate space of communication and even sensual foreplay, not intended for public dissemination. A place where utterance and secrecy co-exist. This study also contributes to the re-assessment of the role of singer and muse, as well as further discussion of one of Casals’ 31 art songs, a still obscure musicological repertoire.

The First Songstress:
The Fragmented History of Lucia Quinciani’s Monody of 1611
Seth Coluzzi, Brandeis University The First Songstress:
The Fragmented History of Lucia Quinciani’s Monody of 1611
Seth Coluzzi, Brandeis University

When Lucia Quinciani released her setting of the text Udite, lagrimosi in 1611, she became the first female composer to publish a solo song, the sixth woman to print music of any kind, and the first Veronese musician to issue a setting from Battista Guarini’s controversial play, Il pastor fido (1589). The piece appeared in the Affetti amorosi of Veronese singer and composer Marc’Antonio Negri with a caption identifying Quinciani as both Negri’s student (discepola) and as a “signora,” a lady of noble standing. Yet in spite of its notable historical position, Quinciani’s sole surviving work has received scant scholarly attention. On the face of it, this neglect seems to be for good reason, for the work shows glaring deficiencies in its text, ending, and large-scale handling of mode. But what remains in the printed music may not be the end of the story for Quinciani’s lament. Indeed, my study of the song’s music, text, and contexts in Negri’s Affetti amorosi leads to the striking discovery that Quinciani’s piece was blatantly cut before coming to print, and offers several possibilities for why this occurred, including social, musical, and print-related considerations. The results offer a novel example of how the constraints of music printing and the dynamics between teacher and pupil might have impinged on a composer’s work in the early Baroque. They also demonstrate how Quinciani’s own compositional interests grew out of the shifting musical currents of early-seventeenth-century Verona.

SUNDAY MAY 1, 2016

10:00-11:30 Mediating Family Through Music: An Investigation of Musical Domesticity in the 19th and 20th Centuries

“Family Time” with the Schumanns: Bourgeois Constructions in Liederalbum für die Jugend, Op. 79
Tessa MacLean, McGill University “Family Time” with the Schumanns: Bourgeois Constructions in Liederalbum für die Jugend, Op. 79
Tessa MacLean, McGill University

Only a year after the successful publication of his Album für die Jugend Op. 68 in 1848, Robert Schumann returned to composing for children: this time for piano and female voices. Liederalbum für die Jugend Op.79 is Schumann’s only vocal work for children and arguably represents a shift in his output of children’s music from solo to ensemble performance. Although scholars have pointed to Op. 79’s nationalistic leanings (Finson, 1990; Mahlert, 1983), its symbolic domesticity begs critical examination. I argue that the Liederalbum represents an idealized image of the Schumanns’ family unity that was fractured in the years they lived in Dresden (1844-1850). I show that the family’s temporary separation during the 1849 Dresden revolution, the tragic death of the couple’s infant Emil, and Clara’s hectic touring schedule prompted Robert to turn to music to re-create a sentimental sense of family unity. As John Gillis (1997) notes, there exists a distinction between families we literally live with and the symbolic, idealized families we live by. In the Liederalbum, symbolic family unity is led by women’s voices in tightly woven harmonies. Moreover, the deceptively difficult, or hidden, musical “labour” required to perform the pieces and texts that ritualize cyclic time through perpetual domestic labour, convey Robert’s bourgeois ideal of women as ritual leaders. Thus, the Liederalbum serves not only as a pedagogical tool, but perpetuates Robert’s middle-class views on family by constructing a family he “lived by”—one that remained with his children even after his death.

“You need only do your duty under all circumstances”: Reconciling Clara Schumann’s Feminine Identity in Victorian Domestic and Public Spheres
Michael Kinney, McGill University “You need only do your duty under all circumstances”: Reconciling Clara Schumann’s Feminine Identity in Victorian Domestic and Public Spheres
Michael Kinney, McGill University

Clara Schumann’s position in nineteenth-century German society was unique for a woman. As a respected concert pianist, she moved between gendered public/private domains central to ideals of domesticity (Gillis, 1989) thus subverting what we may term the geo-political definition of femininity. Curiously, in their attempts to justify her public presence, music critics qualified her performances in terms of masculine professionalism, bringing into question her perceived femininity and position within the 19th century family unit.
This paper aims to reconcile these two opposing images of Clara Schumann, suggesting instead that her public performance identity should be integrated with her domestic identity (cf. Reich, 2001). A rethinking of Clara’s public activities through the revisionist lens of Maintenance Art (Ukeles, 1969) aims to position her performance as an act of motherly care, allowing us to dismiss the masculine appropriation of her male critics. Through a consideration of entries from Clara’s and Robert’s marriage diaries, their correspondence, and Clara’s chosen repertoire during her Copenhagen tour of 1842, I will show that themes of devotion, feminine labor, family unity, and care were important to both their conception of the nuclear family and that Clara, while physically absent, vicariously fulfilled her domestic role through artistic acts. I argue that not only did Clara exemplify acts of essentially Victorian motherly labor through her performances, but that she was also successful in recreating the family unit through her performances of Robert’s works in semi-private performance settings, thus projecting her position as mother within this space.

Looking Back at the Home: L'Enfant et les Sortilèges As Engagement with Late Nineteenth-Century French Domesticity
Rachel Avery, McGill University Rachel Avery, McGill University
Looking Back at the Home: L'Enfant et les Sortilèges As Engagement with Late Nineteenth-Century French Domesticity

Ravel and Colette's 1925 opera-ballet L'Enfant et les Sortilèges presents a fantastical world of singing frogs, dancing teacups, and bizarre arithmetic, yet it remains firmly grounded in the domestic. While analyses of L'Enfant have predominantly employed psychoanalytic lenses (Kaminsky, 2011; Huebner, 2006), I argue that further layers of meaning can be revealed through approaching it in the context of nineteenth-century domesticity and French literature, which shaped Ravel's and Colette's lives and works. Further, considering music and libretto separately allows for aspects of Ravel's engagement with themes of domesticity to be understood as distinct from Colette's, while points of convergence in their attitudes can be better appreciated.
This paper illustrates L'Enfant's engagement specifically with nineteenth-century moral education of children and the role of the mother in the home. Rousseau's model of education, the domestic novel, and fairy tales will serve as cultural and generic references for these concepts. The resulting analysis reveals the role of the Mother metaphorically extending throughout the work beyond her minimal direct presence, significant to L'Enfant's depiction of moral education. Additionally, I propose that while Colette's perspective resonates with the Mother, Ravel's identification lies primarily with the Child. Nonetheless, Ravel and Colette both approach the fairy tale from a twentieth-century outlook shattered by war, obviating the genre's traditional happy ending. By attending to cultural and literary contexts alongside musical detail, we can locate L'Enfant within nineteenth-century French domesticity, illuminate the distinct perspectives brought by its authors, and support the potential for identification with both Child and Mother.