Special Events & Conferences
The City University of New York - Graduate Students in Music
Sixth
Annual Music Symposium
Saturday, 5 April 2003 ADMISSION FREE
CUNY Graduate Center, New York City
365 Fifth Ave, 3rd Floor, Room 3491
9:00 am - 10:00 am
Registration and Welcome
coffee and pastries
10:00am-1:00pm
Brahms to Björk: Analytical Approaches
Professor Shaugn O'Donnell, The City College and Graduate Center, CUNY, Moderator
"From Pathos to Bathos and Back: A New Exegesis for the Scherzo of Brahms's Fourth Symphony"
George-Julius Papadopoulos, University of Washington
"Transformational Autobiography in
'Sprich Nicht'"
Jill Brasky, SUNY Buffalo
"Conflicting
Analytical Approaches to Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century
Tonal Music: A Meta-Theoretical Study"
Jonathan Pieslak, University of Michigan
"Re-Producing Björk"
Brian Karl, Columbia University
1pm-2pm
Lunch Break (lunch provided)
2pm-5pm
European Repertories
Professor Allan Atlas, CUNY Graduate Center, Moderator
"Into the Woods: Orazio Vecchi's Selva di Varia Ricreatione (1590), the Aesthetic of Variety, and the Titling of Italian Music Prints"
Paul Schleuse, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
"An Example of Musical Syncretism: The Emigration of Neapolitan Popular Song to the United States at the Beginning of the 20th Century"
Simona Frasca, University of Naples
"From Alienation to Abnegation: Jenufa and the Metaphysics of Dramatic and Musical Discourse At the Turn of Century"
Matthew M. Werley, Temple University
"Colinde and Communism: Emerging Perspectives in Romanian Ethnomusicology since the Revolution of 1989"
Sabina Pauta, University of Michigan
5pm-6pm
Keynote Speaker
Professor Suzanne Cusick, New York University
For more information, contact Heather Laurel Feldman at hfeldman@gc.cuny.edu.
ABSTRACTS
"From Pathos to Bathos and Back: A New Exegesis for the Scherzo of Brahms's Fourth Symphony"
George-Julius Papadopoulos, University of Washington
Brahms's Fourth Symphony experienced a problematic reception among the composer's friends, contemporary audiences, and critics. Although they eventually acknowledged the work as a masterpiece, they still focused narrowly on the stark presence of the tragic element, in order to find an acceptable interpretive context.
A central problem remains: the stylistic disparity between the Scherzo and its neighbors. This paper will present a number of Brahmsian procedures for generating humor in this movement, and will show that it was conceived as an agent of comic relief, placed strategically so as to undercut the tragedy of its surrounding movements.
return to program schedule
"Transformational Autobiography in
'Sprich Nicht'"
Jill Brasky, SUNY Buffalo
The various motives in "Sprich Nicht" from Das Buch der Hängenden Garten
have been attributed to various musical organizations: Forte's
tetrachords, Krebs's augmented triads, and Bryan Simms's recent assertion that the movement's vocal line and accompaniment are mutually exclusive. This paper argues that Arnold Schoenberg's Op. 15 No. 14 transforms one of its motivic elements, the (9, 2, 3)
trichord, to create both formal boundaries and an intimate bond between the voice and its accompaniment. The historical framework for my argument is the revelation of his wife's affair with the painter Richard
Gerstl, which came to light around the time this brief song was composed in 1908.
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"Conflicting Analytical Approaches to Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Tonal Music: A Meta-Theoretical Study"
Jonathan Pieslak, University of Michigan
By examining conflicting analytical approaches to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tonal music in terms of their unspoken assumptions and philosophical commitments, I hope to identify some of the criteria by which we might validate or invalidate competing theoretical accounts of the same music. My paper develops a meta-theoretical framework for evaluating methodologies by analyzing the competing Schenkerian,
Schoenbergian, and neo-Riemannian approaches from the perspective of Michel Foucault's theory of archaeology. As I believe, each approach's epistemic commitments are based on its acceptance or rejection of three philosophical presuppositions, which, analogous to Foucault's quadrilateral of language in the eighteenth century, represent the discursive formation or the space in which the knowledge of the Schenkerian,
Schoenbergian, and neo-Riemannian methods is made possible. return
to program schedule
"Re-Producing Björk"
Brian Karl, Columbia University
The meanings of post-industrial cultural products spread across a continuum from hyper-standardization, superficiality, and alienation at one extreme, to resistance, hope, and fulfillment, at the other. Björk Remix Web, a fan-produced Internet site dedicated to reconfigurations of publicly-released musical material by the Icelandic-born pop star, demonstrates the particular mediating environment of computer-based virtual communities and newly productive potential that technology brings to audiences of contemporary popular music. Whether these "collaborations" between Björk and her audience move beyond passive consumption or remain parasitic re-inscriptions is unclear, but the occurrence of such a re-modeled partnership between "producer" and "consumers" is itself rich in cultural significance.
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"Into the Woods: Orazio Vecchi's Selva di Varia Ricreatione (1590), the Aesthetic of Variety, and the Titling of Italian Music Prints"
Paul Schleuse, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Orazio Vecchi's Selva di varia ricreatione (Venice, 1590) is remarkable in several respects. No previous Italian print contained works in so many different secular genres, or for so many different size ensembles. Selva was also among the first publications by a single composer to carry a metaphorical rather than a generic title. Unlike earlier metaphorical titles for collections, "Forest of Varied Entertainments" has specific meanings for the books' contents. This paper will examine the titles used in various kinds of 16th-century Italian music prints, the meanings of forest imagery in the renaissance, and Vecchi's aesthetic of musical variety in Selva and later works.
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"An Example of Musical Syncretism: The Emigration of Neapolitan Popular Song to the United States at the Beginning of the 20th Century"
Simona Frasca, University of Naples
Historical records state that many million Italians chose to emigrate between 1880 and 1920. A large number of those emigrants were musicians and even those who were not born in Naples chose to sing in the Neapolitan language. For the many non-Neapolitan aspiring singers Naples once represented a sort of musical
"mecca" for all popular vocal artists in Europe. When, at the end of the 1800s the "Great Emigration" occurred, many such artists moved to the United States, in particular New York. During that same period, American music also underwent a sort of exchange emigration to Italy, specifically Naples. Surprisingly, unlike Jewish, African-American and Latin-American musical traditions that have developed on American soil, for which there are archives, the Neapolitan-American and Italian-American musical archive has yet to be discovered.
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"From Alienation to Abnegation: Jenufa and the Metaphysics of Dramatic and Musical Discourse At the Turn of Century"
Matthew M. Werley, Temple University
Historical discussions of Janácek's Jenufa (1903) have focused on issues of realism, nationalism, and its unique speech-melody style. Considering its late nineteenth-century context, this paper addresses the techniques that Janácek applies to the character
Laca--who bears great structural significance for the opera-through an accompanying Stanislavskian (dramatic) and Schenkerian (musical) analysis. Observing how traditional operatic conventions are negotiated within Janácek's own brand of modernism, a closer look at a pivotal scene in Act II further illuminates the collision of dramatic forces which situate Laca in a long-range trajectory from a position of social alienation to one of abnegation.
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"Colinde and Communism: Emerging Perspectives in Romanian Ethnomusicology since the Revolution of 1989"
Sabina Pauta, University of Michigan
Due to a history of governmental restrictions and methodological limitations, most research on the Romanian Christmas caroling genre
(colinde) tends to exclude scholarly consideration of the political and social contexts in which the music is performed. Over the past decade, changes in state policy and a significantly more tolerant atmosphere for religious and musical expression have led to new channels for transmission, reception, and documentation of caroling events. My paper traces the ways in which innovative perspectives are paving the way for a new kind of Romanian ethnomusicology-one that engages the interplay between music performance, social context, and political policy.
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For more information, contact Heather Laurel Feldman at hfeldman@gc.cuny.edu.
Music Programs • The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue • New York, New York 10016-4309
(212) 817-8590 • music@gc.cuny.edu
