AMS Boston 2019 Abstracts

[Pages:350]AMS Boston 2019

Abstracts

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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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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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Heller's Wonders: Virtuoso Pianism as a Conjuring Effect

Jessie Fillerup (University of Richmond / Aarhus University)

Robert Heller, virtually unknown in music-historical accounts, trained at London's Royal Academy of Music in the 1840s and gave the American premieres of Beethoven's fourth and fifth piano concertos with the Germania Musical Society in Boston. But he also pursued a parallel career in theatrical magic, finding international success by using his musical virtuosity to elevate his social and artistic stature as a conjurer. Between 1852 and 1878, his magic act was seen by tens of millions in Europe, East Asia, and the United States, including areas in the American West never visited by virtuosos like Thalberg. Though usually praised for his musical performances, Heller was also criticized for working in theatrical magic, a field associated with humbugs and grifters. His choice of piano repertoire--works broadly considered "classical," if not "serious"--functioned as a kind of reputation laundering, defending against charges of charlatanism.

In this paper, I draw chiefly on primary sources to show how Heller's pianism, described by critics as a kind of enchantment, helped shape an emerging celebrity culture that treated musical virtuosos and conjurers as kin. His demeanor and style of dress helped him to blur categorical distinctions between music and conjuring--a blend that hardly seemed out of place given the sensationalism of contemporaries like De Meyer and Herz, as R. Allen Lott has documented. Heller also extended notions of musical supernaturalism embodied by figures like Liszt and Paganini, who helped establish the Romantic precedent of virtuosity masquerading as illusion described by Mai Kawabata: he could transform the characteristic sound of his instrument and make technical challenges disappear. Yet critics, who typically lavished attention on the virtuoso body, said little about the physical aspects of Heller's technique. His performances thus reflected a strand of criticism sometimes lost in accounts of pianistic virtuosity: despite the virtuoso's evident labor and the piano's commanding physical presence, the transportive sounds they produced seemed to transcend the bodies of performer and listener alike. In Heller's shows, as in recitals, spectators might forget how the pianist played, remembering only that it seemed magical.

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Controlling Women Sharon Mirchandani (Rider University), Chair

Lizzie Andrew Borden and Lizzie "Baby Doe" Tabor in the 1950s: Punishing Nineteenth-Century Women on

the Twentieth-Century American Opera Stage

Monica Hershberger (SUNY Geneseo)

In 1954, Douglas Moore and Jack Beeson, close friends and colleagues in the Department of Music at Columbia University, began working on operas about notorious nineteenth-century American women. Collaborating with librettist John Latouche, Moore sought to bring back to life Lizzie "Baby Doe" Tabor (1854?1935), the second wife of Horace Tabor, a Colorado businessman and politician who made (and later lost) millions in the silver mines. Beeson initially worked with a writer named Richard Plant to revive Lizzie Andrew Borden (1860?1927), the supposed axe-murderess from Fall River, Massachusetts; when Plant became ill, Beeson contracted Kenward Elmslie, a prot?g? of Latouche. The Central City Opera premiered The Ballad of Baby Doe in Central City, Colorado in 1956. Beeson, Plant, and Elmslie's opera took much longer to make it to the stage. In 1965, the New York City Opera finally unveiled Lizzie Borden: A Family Portrait. Despite the nine years separating the premieres of Baby Doe and Lizzie Borden, the operas and more importantly their heroines--as seen through the eyes of mid-twentieth-century American men--remain strikingly similar and strikingly rooted in the familial politics of the 1950s. Drawing on untouched archival materials including correspondence and script drafts, I reveal how both creative teams constructed their heroines as homewreckers, women who flouted nineteenth and twentieth-century gender expectations. Beeson, Plant, and Elmslie's Lizzie Borden murders her father and step-mother with a hatchet in a thoroughly unladylike rage; Moore and Latouche's Lizzie Tabor steals another woman's husband. Both heroines are punished for their crimes against the family. I show how both operas conclude by musically imprisoning their heroines, dooming them to an unending penitential ritual. The Ballad of Baby Doe and Lizzie Borden thus betray the gendered anxieties that lurked beneath the supposedly placid surface of the 1950s. I argue that for as much as they may have appeared to look and even sound back to notorious women of the nineteenth century, these operas in fact spoke to the quickly shifting status of women and conflicting notions of womanhood on the eve of the Women's Liberation Movement.

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"Women Like Her Cannot Be Contained": Viewership and Musical Rupture in Beyonc?'s Lemonade (2016)

Kelli Minelli (Case Western Reserve University)

Beyonc?'s 2016 album Lemonade dropped without warning, becoming available immediately after the HBO premiere of the accompanying sixty-five-minute film. In addition to visuals supplementing the twelve individual tracks, the filmic Lemonade includes what Holly Rogers calls, "avant garde-influenced, poetic, interstitial section[s]" (Rogers, "Beyonc?'s Lemonade: She Dreams in Both Worlds," 1). These spoken word sections both link and interrupt the music, providing sonic transitions to accompany the twelve-step narrative journey, at times bringing the performance to a complete halt. A richer understanding of Lemonade's multilayered musical and visual materials comes from interpreting the piece as a visual album, and one that Beyonc? herself is mediating. As director and star, Beyonc? controls and utilizes visual effects, temporality, images and sounds to create a commentative, subjective space. These come in the form of musical and sonic ruptures; moments of cessation that deliberately remove the audience from the diegetic realm presented to provide new depth and insight. This paper analyzes the instances of musical rupture within Lemonade as moments of personal excavation and mediation by Beyonc?, each shifting the visual album's framework in terms of subjective context, lived experience, racial history, and formal structure. Building from the scholarship of Carol Vernallis (2016), Cheryl Keyes (2000), and E. Ann Kaplan (2016), I first establish Beyonc?'s defiance of traditional music video techniques, interrupting her songs with sampling and speech to complicate the experience of viewership and presented subjectivity. I then examine the personal and historical dimensions of Lemonade within the context of American popular music and culture, focusing on Beyonc?'s structural innovations. Musical cessation and intertextual interjections impact the spectator, and these technological mediations break expectations of traditional continuity to amplify emotional understanding. I argue that in orchestrating these moments of textural rupture, Beyonc? is complicating and layering audience experience and comprehension of Lemonade as music, narrative, social commentary, and exploration of black women's experience and trauma.

"May she who was once beautiful be transformed into a monster": Magic and Witchcraft in Envy is the Poison of Love (Madrid, 1711)

Maria VirginiaAcu?a (McGill University)

An unusual operatic work premiered at Madrid's Teatro de la Cruz in 1711. The work was the zarzuela Envy is the Poison of Love (Veneno es de amor la envidia), and it differed from other local music dramas in its astonishing final act. Rather than close with a happy resolution, the zarzuela ended with the triumph of evil over

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