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GSIM 2005 Abstracts

“The Manuscript Society of New York”
Jonathon Michael Jones, Pennsylvania State University
The influence of the Manuscript Society of New York on the development of American music has been largely ignored, due primarily to a scarcity of available material concerning the organization. However, the Society functioned as a nexus where the most accomplished and influential American composers mingled with the less known and amateur musicians of the city. This paper describes how that interaction changed the shape of the New York musical scene, and consequently the state of musical composition in America at the end of the 19th century.

“Collage and Structure in Charles Ives’s Putnam’s Camp”
Jennifer Iverson, University of Texas-Austin
Charles Ives’s assemblage of tunes in Putnam’s Camp from Three Places in New England makes “collage” an attractive metaphor for the surface of Putnam’s Camp, yet it is not clear that the metaphor holds on the musical-structural level. An analytical model that allows the analyst to sort the complex surface of the work and subsequently to theorize the structural framework is needed. This paper draws on Albert Bregman’s Auditory Scene Analysis to provide a methodology for constructing hierarchies from the surface up, as it were, based on experiential, cognitive criteria. This paper argues that the structural framework of Putnam’s Camp exhibits spatial rather than linear relationships, making the visual collage metaphor useful at both surface and structural levels.

“Local Polymetric Structures in Elliott Carter’s 90+ for Solo Piano (1994)”
Eve Poudrier, CUNY Graduate Center
The use of simultaneous pulse streams as structural basis for more elaborate rhythmic textures is a central feature in Elliott Carter’s music. This paper presents a methodology for the study of emerging local polymetric structures. In investigating various aspects of the interaction of rhythmic layers (sub-pulse density, nestedness, mensural determinacy), three conceptual models (integrated, polarized, and balanced) are suggested as representative of reasonably predictable metric behaviors. Thus, each successive polymetric state engages the listener to reassess his or her metrical expectations, and it is this interpretative process that articulates the work’s dramatic narrative.

“An Adaptive Analysis of Vincent Persichetti’s Shimah b’koli (Psalm 130) for organ, Op. 89 (1962)”
Sean Cribbs, University of Missouri-Kansas City
Shimah b’koli (Psalm 130) for organ, Op. 89 by Vincent Persichetti exemplifies the analytical difficulty scholars have found with Persichetti’s music. Previous analyses of the work come to debatable conclusions about form and harmonic structure. While the piece seems aurally unified in a serial or freely-atonal style, Persichetti freely pushes the boundaries of atonality. A generalized analytical methodology is necessary to cope with Persichetti’s deviations from convention. The integration of multiple analytical tools in an intuitive and adaptable fashion reveals aspects of form and integration in Shimah b’koli that illuminate an aural experience of the work.

“A Requiem for Reality: The Postmodern Trajectory of Brian Warner”
Charles Mueller, Florida State University
Marketing himself as an evil by-product of American consumer culture, Brian Warner
(better known as Marilyn Manson) dramatizes issues important to today’s youth by
creatively appropriating musical styles from the past. For the album Mechanical Animals
Manson created a song cycle about the postmodern condition, expressing many of the
same concerns raised by cultural critics such as Jean Baudrillard. Ironically, the artist
described the album as an expression of “becoming human for the first time” and utilized
the style of 1970s glam rock to illustrate our inability to escape the artificiality that runs
through almost every aspect of our lives. Guided by Baudrillard’s theories, this paper
investigates how Manson celebrates, ridicules, and laments postmodern life through
creative musical parodies.

“From Third World Poverty to First World Abundance: Reference and Allusion in Jay-Z’s ‘It’s Alright’”
Sara W. Nicholson, Eastman School of Music
Known perhaps as well for his business savvy as his MC skills, Jay-Z has created a veritable empire through tireless self-promotion and bravado. Within this context, his 1998 song “It’s Alright,” seems incongruous as it samples the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” a song whose overwhelming dissatisfaction with materialism seems at odds with Jay-Z’s pervasive enumeration of material possessions. Further, “Once in a Lifetime” contains a reworking of Fela Kuti’s “Water No Get Enemy,” a poignant reference due to Kuti’s own emphasis on class and power struggles within Nigeria.
This paper examines both “It’s Alright” and “Once in a Lifetime” to illuminate the contradictions that this sample brings to its recontextualization. Speaking from within “It’s Alright,” the Talking Heads sample falsifies the song’s message and ultimately reveals Jay-Z’s persona to be a construct that imprisons him.

“Aaron Copland and the American Dream: The Story of a Little-Known Television Career”
Emily Abrams, Harvard University
Unlike that of his friend Leonard Bernstein, Copland’s fascinating career in television has been little documented or discussed. This paper will examine interviews of Copland and documentaries made about him with a view to analyzing the presentation of the composer that they offer. It will be demonstrated that, during the Cold War years, American producers sought to portray not only Copland’s music but also the man himself as a representative of both America and the American dream. Two ocumentaries involving Copland also suggest that this portrayal held appeal to the American government, who exploited it in order to promote the American way of life overseas in the fight against the spread of communism.

“‘Demolish Serious Culture!’: Henry Flynt and the Workers World Party, 1962–67”
Ben Piekut, Columbia University
Henry Flynt (b. 1940) has long been absent from scholarly accounts of experimentalism in the U.S. The recent release of several recordings from the 1960s and 1970s has provided an opportunity to grapple with the iconoclastic ideas of this marginalized thinker. In this paper, I trace the development of Flynt’s anti-art position in the early 1960s, and how it was altered by his involvement in the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party to reflect the language of class struggle and anti-imperialism. I also discuss his eventual departure from that organization, and how his contentious relationship with the WWP can offer wider insights into how we situate obscure figures in history.

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