AMS Boston 2019 Abstracts

AMS Boston 2019

Abstracts

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Thursday Afternoon 2:15?3:45

AMS Boston 2019

Thursday Afternoon 2:15?3:45

Band Cultures Colin Roust (University of Kansas), Chair

Schubert in America: An Examination of Band Programming in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Kate Storhoff (Wake Forest University)

American musical life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a time of change in both repertory and performing forces. By the mid-1800s audiences enjoyed the works of European composers through the programming of American and European orchestra conductors, including Louis Jullien and Theodore Thomas. Among the composers they programmed was Franz Schubert, about whose life and works John Sullivan Dwight published an article in 1852 to fuel the mid-century public interest in the composer. This attention continued throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Though some audience members became familiar with Schubert through performances of his songs, chamber music, and the "Great C Major" and "Unfinished" symphonies in their original forms, many others were exposed to his music through arrangements for band. Examining where and how Schubert was programmed by two of the most prominent bandleaders of the time, John Philip Sousa and Edwin Franko Goldman, reveals insight into how Schubert was regarded by both conductors and audiences. In addition to program analysis, I consider three of the most popular surviving arrangements: Louis-Philippe Laurendeau's arrangement of the two Marche Militaire (1900), Vincent Frank Safranek's arrangement of the Ballet Music from Rosamunde (1919), and Lucien Cailliet's arrangement of the first movement of the "Unfinished" Symphony (1938). Although scholars such as Lawrence Levine have pointed to a division of "highbrow" and "lowbrow" music that emerged in the nineteenth century, the reception of arrangements of Schubert's works demonstrates that it was possible for a piece to be received equally well in the "cultivated" orchestra hall and the "vernacular" bandstand. While it is evident that Sousa and Goldman were largely unconcerned with this emerging distinction, the presence of Schubert arrangements on outdoor concert programs shows that the bandleaders played an important role in introducing different kinds of audiences to the works of European composers without elevating them above American composers; instead they were presented as equals. In all, the programming of these arrangements demonstrates the complexity of audience reception of American bands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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"A Good Band is Much Needed Here": Claiming Citizenship in the Reconstruction South

Mary HelenHoque (University of Georgia)

The organization of bands during the post-Civil War era offers a distinctive opportunity to examine expressions of re-envisioned community identities and civic participation. During this period there is evidence that people used music performance and patronage, amongst other cultural endeavors, to assert social capital and by extension their worthiness to be considered citizens of and by their communities and class. This strategy was particularly significant for African-Americans, a constituency whose power in the post-bellum era was in flux, and in many communities, temporarily ascendant. In the instance of Athens, Georgia, the band became a mechanism through which a community could reknit itself, often opening a space for new voices. As the organizer and leader of Athens's first town band, George Davis offers an example of such a new voice, making significant contributions to life in Athens, Georgia as a barber and as a musician. This paper will demonstrate how Davis's reputation was unique as an African-American musician whose music provided a bridge between black and white communities in the Reconstruction South. By chronicling Davis's accomplishments utilizing historic local newspapers, maps, and photographs to document what is known of Davis's life, this paper will illuminate his role in the Athens community, and, even more intriguing, the substantive nature of his influence as a regional public figure, as both band leader and respected barber, from the time of his service as bugler in the Troup Artillery of Athens in 1858 until his death in 1890.

Sounds to Establish a Corps: The Origins of the United States Marine Band, 1798?1804

Patrick Warfield (University of Maryland, College Park)

The Jeffersonian rise to power ushered in sweeping political changes for the United States; it also focused new attention on the Marine Corps as a group of hostile Congressmen sought to audit the service, dismiss many of its officers, and do away with the executive function of its Commandant. But Thomas Jefferson was also a supporter of the capital's fledgling cultural life, and no organization better defined the connection between music and the federal government than the United States Marine Band. Established in 1798, the service was authorized thirty-two drums and fifes. Following the election of 1800, Marine Commandant William Ward Burrows moved quickly to transform his small group of sanctioned field music into an ensemble that could provide entertainment for the newly-established capital of Washington, D.C. Indeed, newspaper reports, diaries, and recently uncovered orders at the National Archives and Records Administration reveal a sudden search for instruments, a host of performances at Navy Yard balls, and surprising appearances at theaters and benefits.

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AMS Boston 2019

In short, the Federalist Burrows worked to place his scarlet-coated musicians in front of the very Republican Congressmen seeking to undermine his Corps. In the end, Jeffersonians would successfully push Burrows from power, but as this study demonstrates, the pleasure provided by his musicians dissuaded them from disbanding the Corps altogether. In telling the Marine Band's story, this study hopes to serve as a model for a new kind of ensemble history. Instead of focusing on individual leaders or members, it uses the band's uniquely preserved history to show how an ensemble can respond to shifting political tides. Such an approach is particularly important for military groups whose histories have too often been told by fans, acolytes, and those seeking congressional appropriations (indeed mistaken tellings of the Marine Band's history have found their way into prominent studies such as Elise Kirk's Music in the White House and David McCullough's John Adams). As we see here, the band's formation had little to do with leaders, boards, or benefactors and everything to do

with the nation's first shift in partisan, political power.

Conjuring at the Keyboard

E. DouglasBomberger (Elizabethtown College), Chair

"The Labor of the Madman": Charlatanry at the Piano

Charles CrichtonShrader (University of Pennsylvania)

Though remarkably few of Karl Marx's writings contain commentary on aesthetics in general and music in particular, one of Marx's main examples for the distinction between productive and unproductive labor centers on the economy of the piano. In the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus Value, Marx uses the archetypal figures of pianist, piano builder, and piano owner to map a complex relationship of labor and value. Strikingly, he classes the pianist's labor as not only unproductive of capital, but also comparable with "the labor of the madman who produces delusions."

Few musicologists have engaged with Marx's provocation concerning music, value, and the medium of the piano, but some are beginning to see more in the concept of labor (as in Dana Gooley's recent study of Robert Schumann). In view of this I propose to discuss music and labor as embodied in an historical-aesthetic outcast archetype: the "charlatan" keyboard musician in Europe around the year 1800. The decades surrounding this year saw a swell in enterprising, traveling virtuoso keyboardists, who impressed audiences by taking advantage of rapidly developing keyboard technology as well as improvements in music publishing. Some of these musicians also faced charges, brought by a burgeoning class of aesthetic critics, of a noisy fakery, akin to the theatrics of charlatan peddlers of panaceas. In analyzing this historical convergence of aesthetic, commercial, and technological discourses, I suggest that

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these peripatetics enacted music as a slippery form of affective labor in a way that simultaneously thrilled and discomfited their audiences.

This paper's protagonist is the well-traveled pianist and composer Daniel Steibelt (1765?1823), who was traditionally ensconced in music historiography as a charlatan vanquished in a Viennese salon by Ludwig van Beethoven. More recent work by musicologists like David Rowland, William Meredith, and Tom Beghin has foregrounded Steibelt's innovations, particularly his pioneering use of pedals. By taking a close look at his pianos, treatise, compositions, and travel, I will analyze Steibelt's labor as technoaesthetic in nature (following the research of John Tresch) and indicative of the "madness of aesthetic (non-)belonging as music and capitalism rapidly intertwined.

"Real Magic": A Genealogy of the Recital Encore

Zachary Loeffler (University of Chicago)

Although the encore may be a supplement to the recital's main program, it is often lauded by critics and audiences as the solo concert's "most enjoyable," "most gripping and impassioned," "most affecting" playing. This paper traces this peculiar inversion to the early twentieth century, when encores (for the first time grouped after the scheduled program instead of interspersed throughout) were increasingly regarded as the affective highpoints of recitals--what reviewers described as their "real magic." A closer look at this dimension of encoring provides a new perspective on the history of the recital. Histories of the recital usually focus on the evolution of the program in the later nineteenth century. My genealogy starts not with the canonical masterworks of the recital's program but with its apparently trifling encore set, which typically includes opuscula like Mozart's Turkish March, Liszt's "Campanella" Etude, and Moszkowski's ?tincelles. I track the origins of the present-day recital to the encoring rituals conventionalized by the celebrity pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski and his cohort, who inaugurated a scene of encore playing that extends from circa 1900 to the present. I argue that the widespread celebration of Paderewski's encores over his programs was part of a fundamental change in the recital's structure that occurred during his career: the consolidation of two delimited recital spaces, which I call program space and encore space, undergirded by divergent repertories, rituals, and ideologies and yielding different affective experiences. I conclude that through the heightened intimacy, participation, and spontaneity of encore performance as well as the separate distribution of encore albums (with their themes of gifting, domesticity, and personalism), encore space emerged as a mass-mediated public that offered its participant-consumers ameliorative forms of affective connection felt to be in short supply within the more estranging economy of program space. As such, the encore points to the emergence of what Hannah Arendt called "modern enchantment with `small things'"--a global commodity culture whose products offered their buyers experiences of closeness and tenderness that they saw capitalist modernity as increasingly foreclosing.

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