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Senem ACAR (Istanbul Technical University)
Whirling Dervishes: Cosmic Reference to the Absolute Divine Unity in Music and
Movement
The Mevlevî philosophy originated in thirteenth-century Asia Minor with the
mystic poet-philosopher Mevlânâ Jalÿl-uddin Rumi. It influenced all aspects of
Ottoman cultural heritage, contributing not only to the realms of ethics and
metaphysics, but also to artistic domains—in particular, religious and court music.
Music and dance have significant symbolic meaning in Mevlânâ’s Mathnavî
(written in narrative poetic form) and in his other writings on the myth of
creation, mystic precepts, and philosophical systems. The fusion of the
microcosmic human realm with that of the Absolute Divine Unity finds its
expression in the semâ (known historically as ayin-i ÿerif, “blessed ceremony,”
referring to both the Mevlevî ritual and its music), in the sublime rhetoric of the
mystical poems associated with the semâ, and in the whirling movements
themselves. These ecstatic dance movements embody the many diverse symbols
of the semâ, which are also conveyed in musical imagery by the use of
metaphorical and abstract conventions. Employing musicological and
ethnochoreological perspectives I discuss the visual language of movement and
gesture projected in the ceremony, and its relation to music.
Virginia ANDERSON (Open University, West Midlands)
Experimental Music and Visual Culture
Experimental music and the visual arts have had a mutual relationship in which
elements of the visual arts and music have often merged. This session will
explore some of these associations in graphic, improvisational, and systemic
frameworks. The papers proposed are:
Christopher HOBBS (Coventry University)
‘Well, it’s a vertebrate’: The Paradigms of Graphic Notation
[see below]
Bruce COATES (University of Birmingham)
Relationships between Visual Art and Free Improvisation
[see below]
Virginia ANDERSON
‘Just the job for that lazy Sunday afternoon’: British Readymades, Systems Music
and The Visual Arts
‘Systems’, or ‘systemic’ music, are ‘pieces…whose structure and/or note-to-note
procedure [are] determined by a priori numerical systems’ (Christopher Hobbs).
John White invented musical systems, the Machine series, in the mid-1960s,
which are roughly contemporary with Terry Riley’s first work in what would later
be called repetitive or minimal music. Later systems manipulated extant works,
named, following Marcel Duchamp, ‘readymades’, or used mathematical series.
Musical systems have a direct structural analogy in the British systemic art
movement of the 1960s and 1970s (artists including Jeffrey Steele and Keith
Richardson-Jones). While the term ‘systems’ was used for a short time as a
generic catch-all term for minimalism in the 1980s, British systems often obscure
the rigour of numerical process with jocular orchestration or sentimental surface
setting and stand as a distinct style. This paper shall examine features of
systems, their relation to British systemic art and their differences with serialism,
American minimalism and other process music.
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Juliette APPOLD (University of Leipzig)
Nineteenth-Century Landscape Perception and Mendelssohn
Landscapes played a prominent role in 19th-century European culture. They not
only inspired the visual arts, but also became the subject of philosophical,
theological, literary and musical expression.
Mendelssohn himself was greatly influenced by landscapes in his artistic
expression. He not only wrote about them in his letters, he also painted
numerous landscapes. In addition, landscapes were the subject of his musical
compositions, as different works show (e. g. the “Italian Symphony”, the
“Scottish Symphony”, the “Overture to the Hebrides” and the overture to “Die
erste Walpurgisnacht”).
In my paper, I will give an introduction into the philosophical and artistic
perception of landscape in Mendelssohn’s time. From there, I will present selected
passages of Mendelssohn’s letters, in which he gives landscape descriptions of
philosophical and aesthetic interest. Finally I will show how the landscape
perception influenced Mendelssohn as a composer. For this purpose, I will give
some musical examples.
Nicholas ATTFIELD (St Catherine’s College, Oxford)
Bruckner’s ‘Farewell to Life’?: Auflösung and the Absolute in Ernst Kurth’s
Reading of the Adagio of the Ninth Symphony
Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, left unfinished at his death in 1896, has consistently
attracted the claim that it presents the composer’s ‘farewell to life’, a premonition
of his death, and his passing into the hereafter. Particularly in the case of the
closing Adagio, Bruckner’s own words, biographical notions of his final years, and
aspects of the score itself have been rallied in support of this interpretation,
which in turn forms an element of an overarching mythology of the composer as
tragic hero.
This paper addresses the approach to the Ninth’s Adagio presented by Ernst
Kurth in his book Bruckner (1925). Kurth integrates the ‘farewell’ interpretation
with his conviction in music’s autonomous (‘absolute’) nature, resulting in the
displacement of the ‘death’ on to the music of the Adagio itself as it undergoes a
process identified as Auflösung. While this term is translated in normal parlance
as ‘dissolution’ or ‘resolution’, it is also employed by Hegel to describe the
transition from one historical mode of aesthetic expression to another. Using
Kurth ’s presentation of music history (likely derived from Hegel) as evidence, I
shall argue, then, that Bruckner’s Adagio represents for Kurth the final historical
stage in music’s transition into the ‘absolute’ – its detachment from the world and
entry into its own aesthetic realm.
Kurth did not intend, however, that music should thus escape engagement with
pressing cultural issues. On the contrary, Bruckner’s symphonies (epitomized by
the Ninth’s Auflösung) heralded for Kurth the coming of a long-awaited mystical
paradigm for music, potent enough to overthrow the perceived rational excesses
of the day. With Bruckner cast as Christ-like redeemer, Kurth – primarily valued
today for his music theory and analysis – is revealed as evangelist of Germanic
cultural convalescence.
Mark AUDUS (University of Nottingham)
‘A realistic expression of the locality’: Janáček’s revisions to the folk passages in
Jenůfa
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When Janáček’s opera Jenůfa was first performed in Brno on 21 January 1904, it
was billed as a ‘Moravian music drama in 3 acts’, and a programme note probably
by Janáček himself stated that it ‘consciously attempts to be Moravian’, with ‘a
realistic expression of the locality’. Subsequently Janáček, apparently stung by
early criticisms from the Prague press, felt that this very Moravian-ness was an
obstacle to the work’s wider acceptance.
This paper considers the original form of some of the opera’s ‘folk’ passages —
choruses in acts 1 and 3, and a less obvious passage from Act 2 — and traces
their subsequent revision. Using examples from a new reconstruction of the 1904
Jenůfa, it poses — and offers preliminary answers to — the questions: Was
Janáček here covering his tracks, to water down an overtly folkish style? Or was
he trying to find ways of absorbing this influence into his own gradually emerging
mature musico-dramatic style? And how do these revisions impact on the opera’s
Naturalism and sense of ‘locality’?
Markus BANDUR (University of Freiburg)
On-screen music synchronization in German silent film
In order to guarantee the correspondence of visual and musical information,
several competing synchronization techniques operating with on-screen tools
came into use in reaction to the unsatisfactory interplay of live music and silent
film performance.
Be it a filmed conductor in a separate window below the film or be it the
integration of the music score running from right to left at the bottom of the
screen: these and other techniques of sychronization led to discussions about the
necessity of keeping the visual information unadulterated by these additional cues
as a condition of perfect illusion and resulted in methodological reflections
concerning film as a synaesthetic art.
This paper explores historical models of on-screen synchronization like opera and
focuses on the emergence of a genuine psychological understanding of film
music. From this new perspective film music was not regarded as mere
accompaniment of the primary visual information but was to enhance the
emotional dimension of the film.
Nicholas BARAGWANATH (Royal Northern College of Music)
Melodic Strategy in the Arias of Puccini
The predominance of melody for Puccini, as for Italian opera in general, is beyond
question. Many of his best-known arias consist of little else, with harmony and
bass-line rendered almost superfluous by melodic doubling.
Ever since Torrefranca’s critique (1912), studies of Puccini’s melodies have
assumed a primarily cellular or motivic construction and employed corresponding
analytical approaches, perhaps better suited to the study of the German tradition.
Such motivic arguments are seldom sufficient to explain the way in which the
melodies are constructed as self-contained musical units, incorporating their own
dynamic flow and effective conclusion. Puccini’s detachable arias were designed
to secure the success of an opera and to lead separate concert careers in sheetmusic form. What mattered was not so much the motivic integrity of the melody,
nor its connection with other parts of the opera, but rather the effectiveness of its
lyrical expression as presented through an overall emotional contour, which,
judging by the vast majority of examples, should intensify throughout toward a
clear and convincing peak. It follows that the climactic moment may be shown to
constitute the goal of a logical musical process. This paper sets out to explain the
musical techniques that govern a number of well-known melodies, focussing in
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particular upon the strategies employed to ensure a meaningful and convincing
correspondence of musical and emotional narratives.
The paper takes as its starting-point Verdi’s celebrated description of Italian
composers as ‘descendants of Palestrina’. It will argue that Puccini’s melodies not
only comply with traditional ‘rules’ of counterpoint and voice-leading but also
exploit them to generate effective dynamic linear shapes. A number of case
studies will demonstrate different melodic strategies.
Jeremy BARHAM (University of Surrey)
Music and Screen: Modes and Models of Temporal Interaction
The comparative functions of temporal processes in music and moving-image art
forms have been the subject of occasional theoretical discussion i n screen/screen
music literature (for example, Bordwell, Chion, de La Motte-Haber & Emons,
Harrell, Mitry, Neumeyer & Buhler, Widgery). But these discussions have by no
means exhausted the topic or provided systematic understanding of the field.
Drawing together theories of screen structure, screen music function and musical
temporality, this paper identifies signifying properties of audio-visual temporal
interaction on three interrelated levels: the culturally allusive, the kinetic and
locally expressive, and the deeper structural. It illustrates some of these
operations in varied examples of screen media, some of which foreground
narrational and/or conceptual issues of the distortion or manipulation of time, and
thereby suggests a framework for future research paths in understanding the
structuring of time in multiple media.
Michael BAUMGARTNER (University of Salzburg/University of British Columbia)
Reinventing the Musical Comedy: Michel Legrand, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques
Demy
Although “Une femme est une femme” (1961) is a tribute to Hollywood’s musical
comedy, Godard breaks with the tradition, calling the film “an idea of a comédie
musicale.” With the assistance of the composer Michel Legrand, Godard tested
the potentials of film music employing it as a metacinematic device. The music
does not underscore dialogues, but – like in an opera recitative – short musical
interludes fill the gaps between the dialogues and “comment” on the spoken
words. Three years later, in 1964, Legrand continued the “experiment” in Jacques
Demy’s “Les parapluies de Cherbourg”. In “Cherbourg” he again applied his
“recitative” technique, but in this case with all characters singing the complete
dialogue. In the films of Demy and Godard the music does not fulfill the same
task as in mainstream cinema, e. g., as an unheard accompaniment beneath the
dialogue, covering up the rough montage. To the contrary, the film makes clear
that for the “Nouvelle Vague” directors music must highlight the mechanics of
cinema – discontinuity and fragmentation, and must create a distance between
the on-screen action and the audience. Consequently, film music reminds us that
cinematic realism is ultimately highly artificial.
Maarten BEIRENS (KU Leuven Belgium)
Non-narrative approaches to musical and dramatic structure in minimal musicrelated music theatre by Michael Nyman and Steve Reich
Starting with Einstein on the Beach (1976) by Philip Glass, a repertoire of
“minimalist” opera – or more correctly: music theatre – has been established,
which includes landmark operas by composers such as Glass, Louis Andriessen
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and John Adams. Apart from the use of a common minimal music-related musical
style, many of these works share several comparable approaches to the music
theatre-genre, such as the importance of the visual aspect, the prevalence of
abstraction over narrative structure, and the prevalence of a ritualistic character
over traditional psychological development. Two such cases in which the minimal
music-related musical elements are combined with an alternative approach to the
‘narrative’ structure of the work, will be discussed here: Michael Nyman’s The
Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (1986) and Steve Reich’s The Cave (1993).
This paper examines how the incorporation of such unconventional dramatic
structures as, respectively, a neurological case-study and a ‘documentary’
montage of spoken interviews in the context of the music-theatre pieces by
Michael Nyman and Steve Reich has a profound impact on the choice and
organisation of the musical material of these compositions. These particular
approaches to dramatic structure, which can probably be related to the influence
of audiovisual media on the opera-genre, are then situated in the recent tradition
of minimalist music-theatre.
Gurminder BHOGAL (Wellesley College)
Bejwelled Divinity and Exotic Fantasy in Delibes’s Lakmé (1883)
Erotic images of bejewelled Divas elicit conflicting reactions of arousal and
repulsion in us. While we relish the temptress’s dazzling presence and
mesmerizing voice, her ornaments saturate our visual and aural senses to induce
a loss of consciousness. In refining perceptions of coloratura as fetishizing the
voice (Abbate); marking sexual aberration (McClary); and transgressing musical
conventions (Smart) this paper explores how Lakmé’s virtuosity surpasses its
status as mere decoration to denote positive female attributes.
In critiquing associations of surplus with seduction, I first uncover the sacred
dimension of Lakmé’s Bell Song, which blends Hindu epic with embellishments to
segregate listeners of her tale from listeners of her music. A cultural divide exists
between natives who understand coloratura as intensifying the mythic encounter,
and foreigners who remain transfixed by ornamental complexity. Next, drawing
on Lakmé’s prayer I demonstrate her emergence as an emblem of divine
femininity rather than exotic seductress; her cadenzas indicate passionate prayer,
not madness.
Finally, I note how Delibes further exposes western stereotypes of ornament by
using Lakmé’s necklace to catalyse Gerald’s exotic fantasy. No longer an inherent
constituent of Lakmé’s voice and body, this jewel reveals disjuncture between
marginalized conceptions of ornament in the west, and its privileged status in the
east.
Alexandra BUCKLE (Magdalen College, Oxford)
Music and Iconography in Richard Beauchamp’s Chantry Chapel
Richard Beauchamp (1382-1439), earl of Warwick, was the closest friend of
Henry V and Governor to Henry VI. He led an active military career being knight
of the Garter, Captain of Calais and Captain of Rouen at the trial of Joan of Arc.
Beauchamp maintained a large household chapel consisting of eighteen men and
nine choristers and employed some of the leading composers of the day.
In his will, he left several music books to the Collegiate Church of St Mary,
Warwick, of which he was patron, and the financial means for a Lady Chapel to be
erected in his honour there. Work began on the chapel two years after his death
and this funerary ensemble is now largely considered to be the finest medieval
chantry chapel in England. The extant 1447-49 contracts implicitly state that the
finest and best materials were to be used. The glazing contract was no exception:
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the royal glazier was hired to glaze all the windows with ‘the finest wise with the
best, cleanest, and strongest glass of beyond the sea that may be had in
England’. Much of the original glass survives, which features a rare array of
musical iconography. A host of angels playing 22 different instruments are
depicted, along with two Marian antiphons and a polyphonic Gloria. These, along
with the windows containing images of various prophets, apostles and the Virgin
Mary, allow a tantalising glimpse into the commemorative chapel of a late
medieval English music patron.
Michele CABRINI (Hunter College)
'But, What Do I See, What Do I Hear?': Representing Storms in late 17th- and
early 18th-century France.
In early 18th-century France, musical depictions became a fundamental element
of the operatic experience. In 1719, Dubos contended that dramatic symphonies
engage us to the action and affect our moods almost as powerfully as the verses
of Corneille or Racine. Chief among these instrumental topoi was the tempest,
whose violent sound and imagery captured the attention of contemporary
audiences. By 1724, Sébastien de Brossard noted, tempests became so popular
that they began transcending opera, making their way into cantatas and motets.
Owing to a peculiarly French baroque aesthetics claiming that all the arts
must adhere to a common denominator of expression--imitating human actions
and passions--the depictions of storms shared similar principles among different
artistic media. Cantatas and paintings particularly shared a common trait--the
articulation of single moments in time and space. In my paper, I will show that
the representation of storms in French cantatas and landscape paintings caused
violent emotions--typically fear or rage--in the listener or the beholder alike.
While authors employed methods of representation appropriate to each medium,
one common principle united these representations--the depiction of motion
(mouvement) achieved in painting through exaggerated facial or bodily
movement, in music through overblown rhythmic activity, textures and tempi.
Freda CHAPPLE (University of Sheffield)
Performing Sondheim today: music theatre, cinema, art and digital media.
The work of Stephen Sondheim offers a particularly rich vein for an exploration of
the intermedial weave of song, stage and screen; for not only has Sondheim
redefined the subject matter previously deemed appropriate to the American
musical comedy stage, but he has expanded its medial boundaries to present the
‘reality’ of American society. Drawing on a new conceptual framework of
Intermediality, this will paper will set a selection of Sondheim’s music in the wider
context of theatre, cinema and digital media. It will argue that Sondheim’s work
draws on the plots, devices and media of literature, theatre, cinema and art to
create a powerful, complex and socially aware form of ‘music theatre’ in
performance; and it will discuss how his intermedial composition techniques
position the audience both inside and outside the performance. The paper will
focus initially on Sunday in the Park with George (Menier Chocolate Factory
Theatre, London 2005-06) where digital media painted the performers into a
theatre of virtual reality and conclude with a discussion of forthcoming Sondheim
productions: Assassins (Sheffield Theatres, March 2006) and Into the Woods
(Derby Playhouse, April/May, 2006) to assess if they too have incorporated digital
media as part of their productions.
Wai-Ling CHEONG (Christian University of Hong Kong)
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Twelve-tone painting of nature in Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux
In Catalogue d’oiseaux block-chord series or, alternatively, note series that
complete the 12-tone space are fabricated with recourse to a myriad of
permutations (‘interversions’ in Messiaen’ s word) generated by one specific
symmetrical permutation scheme. They are stationed at strategic points of this
gigantic birdsong cycle and Messiaen often encourages us to relate them to such
divergent imagery as ragged rock formations, fog, birds in flight or flowing
streams. In Catalogue d’oiseaux I, for instance, block-chord series that are
notable for its zealous pursuit of 12-tone completion takes shape to depict ‘chaos
de blocs écroulés du clapier Saint Christophe’. The chords are tied up with
Messiaen’s obsession for 12-tone completion, the realization of which is dictated
by interversions derivable from an overriding permutation scheme. Elsewhere in
the piano cycle we also come across interversions that spin out lines rather than
chords to go along with the imagery of bird flight and water flow. The sheer
extent of the 12-tone writing to which this symmetrical permutation scheme can
be fitted like a glove leaves us with hardly any doubt as to its validity even
though it is not documented in any existing sources. This paper explores the
intricate correlation between Messiaen’s open claim to paint nature and his
undisclosed reliance on a highly contrived permutation scheme to complete the
12-tone space.
Michael CHRISTOFORIDIS (University of Melbourne)
Memories of the Alhambra: Fin de siècle Paris and musical evocations of Granada
Alhambrism, the Romantic construction of Granada as the last European refuge of
Arab culture, constitutes one of the most enduring manifestations of exoticism.
By the end of the nineteenth century the topoi of Alhambrism in literature and
the visual arts drew on an imagined landscape of Granada that included
arabesques, crepuscular gardens and fountains, mediated by the nostalgic
utterance of king Boabdil bidding farewell to Granada ("The Moor's Last Sigh").
The widespread dissemination of these images is attested to by the exotic theme
park, "Andalusia in the time of the Moors", a centrepiece of the 1900 Universal
Exposition in Paris. They also exercised a powerful influence on fin-de-siècle
music across the Franco-Spanish cultural divide, especially through the
interaction in Paris between Isaac Albéniz, Manuel de Falla, Claude Debussy and
the Apaches. Drawing on compositional papers and annotations to personal
libraries, this research illuminates the cross-influences between the above
composers, including their shared knowledge of Alhambrist literary texts and
visual artefacts. It also traces the metamorphosis of images of Granada into
specific musical gestures in their Alhambrist scores and "night music", which
constitute some of the most complex manifestations of musical exoticism.
David CODE (university of Glasgow)
Carnival and Ceremony: Rehearing the Festivities in Debussy’s “Fêtes”
After the frenetic close of the first section of Debussy’s second Nocturne, “Fêtes,”
the muted trumpets of a distant military procession enter and crescendo to
overwhelming proximity. When whirling dance figures return atop the loudest
fanfares, a collision occurs between two starkly contrasting modes of musical
“festivity.”
Debussy later located his inspiration in an early, post-1870 “fête nationale,”
during which the Garde républicaine passed through the “réjouissances
populaires” in the Bois de Boulogne. The first “July 14th” festival (1880) had
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indeed occurred in the Bois, with music by the Garde. But though “Fêtes” might
recall those early Republican days, a rehearing of its fanfares as if experienced in
its years of composition (1897-99) can better explain the “disconcerting”
undercurrents sensed at the 1900 première. During those central, fraught years
of the Dreyfus Affair, heated debates about “respect for the Army” had produced
such opposed responses as Gohier’s L’Armée contre la Nation and Brunetière’s La
Nation et l’Armée.
Against this background, “Fêtes” can be heard to confront the perennial question,
for any democracy, about the relationship between “the people,” “the nation,”
and “the army.” Debussy starts with a bouyant musical version of
“carnivalesque.” Then, in the march, post-Wagnerian harmony and a totalising
deployment of foursquare phrasing seem to enforce the kind of exhilarated
submission demanded by the Dreyfus-era nationalism of Maurice Barrès. But by
infecting the da capo carnival with echoes of the fanfares, Debussy gives us cause
to think again about our response to such militant ceremonies—whether or not
they fly a Republican flag of “Liberty.”
Bruce COATES (University of Birmingham)
Relationships between Visual Art and Free Improvisation
This paper shall examine links between improvisation and the visual arts and
explore an apparent aesthetic contradiction inherent in the work of the British
ensemble AMM. In 1960, Ornette Coleman made the tacit link between visual art
and improvisation when he used Jackson Pollock’s White Light on the cover of his
seminal 1960 recording Free Jazz. Since this moment, there has been a tangible
link between the work of free improvisers and that of visual artists. Many
improvisers not only draw upon visual influences and ideas but also have
themselves backgrounds in the visual arts. There are two distinct approaches:
the first, direct plastic expressionism, is exemplified by Coleman and latterly
Barry Guy. The second, a more conceptual practise relating to the anti-painting
aesthetic of Marcel Duchamp, is most commonly associated with the work of
AMM, specifically guitarist Keith Rowe, who shows a direct link with Duchamp
through his use of the objet trouvé. However, AMM’s approach is not one of antiexpression, as it marries both aesthetics comfortably.
Barry COOPER (University of Manchester)
An Unrecorded Music Collection in Wales
University of Wales Lampeter is one of the oldest universities in Britain, and its
library has been collecting material ever since the 1820s. Especially during its
first 30 years, many rare items were collected, including some music. The
university has not specialised in music, however, and this collection of music
sources, all dating from the 18th or early 19th century, has never really been
explored hitherto. It remains uncatalogued to this day, and there are no printed
references to it in the standard literature. The present investigation has sought to
relate the printed-music items in the collection to existing catalogues such as
those in RISM and the British Library’s online catalogue. The numerous cases
where no match could be found, however, indicate that Lampeter has a
surprisingly large number of unica. These and certain other rare items, including
a few music manuscripts, are of considerable interest and are explored further
during the paper, which also examines the provenance of the collection on the
basis of inscriptions found on certain volumes.
Carola DARWIN (University of Sheffield)
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The Other point of view: gender and autonomy in Strauss’ Salome
Richard Strauss’ opera Salome was written at a time of intense debate over the
changing role of women in society. In this paper I explore some of the themes
that informed the discourse in the German-speaking world, drawing on a variety
of contemporary texts, both fictional and polemical. I investigate the way that
these preoccupations are reflected in the opera, arguing that what underlies the
debate is a growing awareness of the autonomy of women (and of other
disadvantaged groups): their position as subject, their point of view, their will to
choose and act.
Starting from the analysis of consciousness in narrative developed by the
literary theorist Dorrit Cohn, I develop the idea that the orchestra acts as a
narrator, slipping in and out of the characters’ heads in the same way that a
narrator in a novel is able to. I suggest that, as a result, the audience is given a
sense of the different characters’ points of view, so that even when the
characters are unquestionably alien and “Other”, the audience members are
encouraged, even forced, to recognise their autonomy.
Annette DAVISON (University of Edinburgh)
Locating the “jazz” in the music for A Streetcar Named Desire
The setting of Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire is New Orleans.
Jazz was always a key element of the play, and the original play-script contained
clear indications concerning music. Elia Kazan, director of the play’s debut, made
different decisions about the placement and character of the music. Cue sheets
recently discovered among Williams’ papers for the first time give a clearer
indication of the incidental music heard during the play’s 1947 debut production.
Reports suggest that the production of the music in the theatre was in itself
unusual, to assist in generating a sense of music overheard from clubs located
around the apartment where the action takes place.
The adaptation of the play into a film brought more collaborators on board. Kazan
remained at the helm, and asked Alex North to score the film. North’s score
combines some of the play’s incidental music with specifically cinematic music
techniques, and a jazz influenced score, famously censored by the Office of the
Production Code for being too “carnal”. This paper traces the place of jazz in the
play and the film, and sets out to demonstrate the contribution that collaboration
and contingency made to the final form of these groundbreaking productions.
Nicola DIBBEN (University of Sheffield)
Cybjörk: The role of the visual in the music of Björk
Björk is renowned not only for her musical output, but for the originality and
variety of visual material which accompanies her music: cover art for recordings
and art work for websites; promotional photographs for the press; music videos
and documentaries; her (controversial) clothing; physical movement in
performance and staging, including costume and set design; and the visual as
subject matter of her music, and as metaphor in critical discourse on it. In this
paper I trace commonalities between these multi-media outputs, showing how
they privilege certain readings of Björk’s music and persona. I argue that the
interaction between auditory and visual elements of Björk’s multi-media output
blurs the boundary between technology and nature (conceived as flora, fauna,
humans and landscape). This theme appears elsewhere, such as the work of
artist Rebecca Horn whose animal-machine installations challenge cultural
stereotypes of nature/technology distinctions, and is most famously articulated in
Donna Haraway’s seminal critique of technology in late twentieth US culture.
Using analyses of the award-winning music video 'All is Full of Love' (1999) and
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musical film Dancer in the Dark (2000) I show how this theme pervades Björk’s
work and its critical reception, and contributes to the constructed Nordic identity
identified by Daniel Grimley. This focus on Björk’s ‘cyborg’ aesthetic illustrates
the significance of the visual in contemporary pop music culture, and the way that
auditory and visual information interact and contribute to the perception of
meaning in multi-media artefacts.
Laura DOLP (Wellesley College)
‘Body into Sky’: Arvo Pärt’s Lamentate and Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas
One of the self-professed inspirations for Arvo Pärt’s composition
One of the self-professed inspirations for Arvo Pärt’s composition Lamentate
(2003, piano and orchestra) is Anish Kapoor’s sculpture, Marsyas, which was
shown in 2002 at Tate Modern. Named after the mythic satyr who was flayed
alive by Apollo, the installation was comprised of masive steel rings joined by a
span of dark red PVC membrane that exploited the length and height of Turbine
hall. The last of a three-part series, Marsyas was billed as an exploration of
metaphysical polarities, such as “presence and absence, being and non-being,
place and non-place and the solid and the intangible,” through the experience of
discrete, shifting spaces. In Lamentate, Pärt’s hieratic and apocalyptic musical
response engages Marsyas through its own unique set of polarities, characterized
by the composer as brutally “overwhelming” and intimately “fragile.” I propose
that despite the continued Orthodox foundation of Pärt’s music, Lamentate
represents a more humanist response than his music has embraced over the last
two decades. Rather than shunning the tension of opposing forces cultivated in
European art music since the Enlightenment, Lamentate represents a more
complex response to the enigmatic content of Kapoor’s work. Pärt’s ideological
critique of reason as well as suggestive blurring between time and space as a
pre-condition of death, functions as a shared point of contact between the two
works.
Stephen DOWNES (University of Surrey)
Modern Musical Waves: A Technical and Expressive Aspect of Post-Wagnerian
Form
Writing of the Seventh Symphony, Wagner described Beethoven as embarking on
a stormy voyage with its direction not navigated homeward but toward the
beyond, in a testing of limits on the sea of insatiable longing. Wagner’s
description suggests a familiar formal metaphor: the wave. In musical waves the
height of energetic expression is followed by an end which might be felt as a
decline or disintegration as much as a resolution of tension, with form heard as a
consequence of processes of becoming and teleology. Kurth famously described
Wagner’s and Bruckner’s music in terms of the ‘internal energetic will of surging
undercurrent’ which produces, by contrast with Classical periodic structures,
‘developmental waves’ that become the ‘basic formal principle’. The imagery is
pervasive: as Agawu, in a discussion of Schumann, asserted, the archetypal
pattern of a narrative curve structured around a Highpoint was ‘the most
consistent principle of formal structure in nineteenth-century music’.
As Hepokoski explains, the response of the modern generation of composers who
inherited the ‘recently reified or crystallized’ post-Wagnerian musical idiom was to
interrogate this legacy through deformations of inherited formal structures and
narrative processes. We can extend this notion to consider deformations of wave
forms. Such deformations can be considered a vital part of the modernist
questioning of heroic formal paradigms and the post-Kantian Romantic sublime,
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as cultural anxieties were manifested in the resistance or counterforce to
degeneration and stagnation, or, by contrast, in the obsession with decay and
dissolution in the aesthetics of decadence.
This preliminary study will illustrate some key aspects of this post-Wagnerian
formal procedure with examples from works composed in the first decade of the
twentieth century: the finale of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, Berg’s Piano Sonata,
and the symphonic poem Returning Waves by the Polish composer Karłowicz. The
musical future is as bleak as the image of returning waves which toss the hero
into the abyss and must themselves crash, self-destructively into the rocky coast.
Fiona FORD (University of Nottingham)
Mutiny on a Chinese Train: Composed sound effects in Edmund Meisel’s score for
Ilya Trauberg’s The Blue Express
Edmund Meisel (1894–1930) wrote his final film score for Trauberg’s silent
melodrama The Blue Express in 1930. Originally written for live performance in
Berlin, Meisel also recorded his music with the Lewis Ruth Band to create a sound
version, completed in France as Le Train Mongol in 1931. A nitrate copy survives,
preserving this rare example of a silent film with original synchronised music and
sound effects; no dubbed dialogue sections were added, as was more often the
case when silent films were converted to sound during that period. Meisel’s
satirical accompaniment contrasts modern toe-tapping American jazz with
oriental music, to mirror the visual contrast between the rich ruling classes and
the downtrodden Chinese peasants who inhabit separate carriages of the train on
which nearly the entire film is set. The train itself is depicted through composed
instrumental sound effects, inviting comparison with Honegger’s Pacific 231
(1923), but Meisel overlays the train noises with a jazz accompaniment – in a
way atypical of contemporaneous sound films – prefiguring the increasingly
engineered sound-worlds of later Hollywood blockbusters. Examples from the
soundtrack and documentary evidence regarding the type, number and groupings
of instruments used will demonstrate Meisel’s pioneering sound-film work.
Peter FRANKLIN (St Catharine’s College, Oxford)
Booing the Infanta, and the musical genealogy of Hollywood’s ‘romanticism’.
Film theorists or historians have often crudely theorized the music of classical
Hollywood cinema as ‘romantic’. Stylistic and conceptual categories have been
uncritically conflated to gloss historiographical investment in the modernist
discourse about regression, nostalgia and utopian false consciousness. Light may
be shed on this by examining pre-Hollywood examples of visualized musical
narrative in which the sound and manners of later film scoring techniques are
anticipated. Franz Schreker’s 1908 ballet-pantomine The Birthday of the Infanta
(after Wilde) contains one scene, musically elaborated in the 1923 concert
version of the score, which interestingly exemplifies the Viennese musical style
that would be exported to Hollywood via Korngold and Max Steiner.
The work was presented as part of a retrospective show by Klimt and other
painters, designers and architects who had broken away from the Secessionist
movement. As another early Viennese manifestation of a kind of artistic avant
garde, the Kunstschau raised complex cultural-political issues which its aura of
decadent aestheticism confused. That confusion was to be heightened in a
peculiarly relevant manner when an attempt was made to revive Schreker’s
pantomime in a vaudeville theatre in 1910, in a programme which featured
acrobats, magicians, a boxing kangaroo and Biosocope performances.
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Susan K. de GHIZE (University of Denver)
Goethe’s Farbenlehre and Hauptmann’s Die Natur
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) is best known as the author of such
works as Faust. However, he was most proud of his 1400-page scientific work,
Farbenlehre (“Color Theory”), where he interprets colors, analyzes how colors are
formed, and discusses how they relate. Despite the importance Goethe placed on
his Color Theory, modern music scholars have focused on Goethe’s other
scientific writings instead of Farbenlehre. However, when comparing Farbenlehre
to the musical ideas of nineteenth-century theorist Moritz Hauptmann (17921868), one can find many fascinating similarities.
Hauptmann’s treatise, Die Natur der Harmonik und der Metrik, has been noted for
its uniqueness. Indeed, both Goethe’s and Hauptmann’s works neglect any
mathematical experiments and attempt to explain all conditions under one
universal law. Polarity is undeniably one of the most important concepts in both
Goethe’s and Hauptmann’s beliefs. In Farbenlehre, Goethe separates colors and
qualities into two categories, plus and minus; similarly, Hauptmann describes
harmony and meter as positive and negative unity. By comparing these ideas
and others from Goethe’s Farbenlehre to the writings of Hauptmann, I hope to
demonstrate the importance of their relationship.
Germán GIL-CURIEL (University of Nottingham, Ningbo)
The Confluence of Music, Literature and Cinema: A Comparative Approach to the
Aesthetics of Death in Tous les Matins du Monde
Within the framework of philosophy of music and from the perspective of a
comparative methodology, this paper explores some of the metaphysical features
that constitute the specificity of an Aesthetics of Death in Tous les matins du
monde, and how the narrative discourses in the literary, musical and
cinematographic domains merge in both the novel and the film, through music.
Written by Pascal Quignard and published in 1991, Tous les matins du monde was
adapted for the screen by Alain Corneau the same year, the music being directed
and performed by Jordi Savall. This enquiry, aesthetical and metaphysical, deals
with two essential motifs in Quignard’s novel and Corneau’s homonymous film:
the reunion and the separation of the amants in the context of two different
narrations. In addition, both acts are caused by the strong feelings and emotions
of consuming passions. The former is possible in the context of the supernatural
thanks to the return of the dead, whereas the latter happens though the
voluntary renunciation of life. Thus inextricably bound up with the theme of
Death, both transcendental events share the same fatal impossibility of fulfilling
love: a ghost in love coming from the beyond just during the time of a piece of
music and an actual suicide in love departing for the beyond. Both extreme
experiences are transposed to a deeper dimension of internalisation thanks to
moving ineffable, music: Marin Marais’ La Rêveuse and Sainte Colombe’s Les
Pleurs, respectively.
Paula HIGGINS (University of Nottingham)
Stemming the Rose, Queering the Pitch: The Cultural Politics of Rufus
Wainwright's The Maker Makes
Written for the soundtrack of Brokeback Mountain, Rufus Wainwright’s The Maker
Makes is the second of two musical postludes at the end of the film. Forming a
symbolic aural counterpart to the two shirts that figure poignantly in the film’s
final visual, the song is closeted, as it were, behind Willie Nelson's cover of He
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Was a Friend of Mine; as such, it often goes unheard by viewers who exit before
the final credits have run. The Canadian, American-born Wainwright, son of wellknown leftist folk singers, has become widely recognized in recent years as a
phenomenally gifted musician, ‘the greatest songwriter on the planet’ as Sir Elton
John recently dubbed him. Known for its creative audacity, Wainwright’s music is
born of a deep passion for opera and classical music, and his eclectic and esoteric
popular style defies easy pigeonholing. Wainwright is also one of few out and
outspoken gay artists and activists in the music industry and his more recent
music has increasingly addressed important matters of cultural politics.
This paper proposes a hermeneutical reading of The Maker Makes as a musical
palimpsest aurally haunted by the memory of two well-known American popular
songs of the 20th century, romantic and religious respectively, whose texts tacitly
gloss and enhance its cultural and personal politics. It further aims to
contextualise these palimpsestic intertexts historically with respect to the timehonoured literary symbolism of the ‘rose’ and particularly, the allegedly
neologistic queer inflection of the film ’s most provocative phrase, ‘stem the rose’.
Based on this historicized, multilayered reading, Wainwright’s epistemologically
closeted tribute to the epoch-making, celluloid lovers, Jack and Ennis, assumes a
powerfully transgressive political status as a culturally mainstreamed anthem
advocating gay rights and specifically, same-sex marriage.
Christopher HOBBS (Coventry University)
‘Well, it’s a vertebrate’: The Paradigms of Graphic Notation
This paper shall examine the history of performance practice with regard to
graphically notated works of contemporary music. It will investigate the context
in which the works were written, both in terms of their visual design and implied
aural realisation, comparing them with more conventionally notated examples in
order to determine how their composers regarded possible interpretation of their
works and whether these implied interpretations prescribe a certain life-span for
the works, dependent on the culture from which they sprang. It will refer to
different performance practices, taking examples from the works of Feldman,
Stockhausen, Cardew and others in order to try to define what the identity of a
piece of graphic music actually ‘is’ and how this identity can be said to differ from
that of a musical score. It will suggest that by its very nature graphic notation
lays the composer’s intentions open to considerable misconstruction and will
investigate what determines a ‘conformist’ or a ‘deviant’ interpretation. Finally it
will investigate to what extent a ‘deviant’ interpretation can still be said to
represent the composer’s wishes.
Peter A. HOYT (University of South Carolina, USA)
Monostatos, the Recumbent Pamina, and Eighteenth-Century Comic Art
Among the first published versions of Die Zauberflöte are two with vignettes in
which the impassioned Monostatos surveys Pamina while she sleeps. Whereas
illustrated title pages of operas usually represent a principal dramatic moment
(such as the burning of the Capital in La clemenza di Tito), these two publications
depict an encounter that is somewhat redundant (Monostatos previously
confronted an unconscious Pamina in Act I) and perhaps peripheral ("Alles fühlt
der Liebe Freuden" is often dropped from abridged performances). It is therefore
striking that both vocal scores, which were apparently prepared independently,
select this scene for their covers.
An investigation of contemporaneous art, however, reveals that the
contemplation of an isolated sleeping female by a concupiscent male was a
common comic subject, one often represented in relatively inexpensive prints.
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These illustrations were erotically charged, for several cues (body posture, the
presence of books, etc.) typically suggest that the woman fell asleep in an
amorous state and, upon awaking, will impulsively reciprocate the male's desire.
In conceptualizing Monostatos and Pamina, Schikaneder and Mozart drew upon
tropes made familiar by numerous printed images, and it was natural for
engravers subsequently to restore this scene to its popular--and provocative-visual form.
David IRVING (Clare College Cambridge)
Music in regulations, reforms and controversies of the church in 18th-century
Manila
Music was highly regulated in Manila, capital of the Philippine Islands, by the
ecclesiastical and secular governments during the eighteenth century. Political
and military events of this period gave rise to reforms and controversies in the
use of music in public celebration and liturgical worship, particularly in Manila,
occasionally resulting in officially-published codification. Ecclesiastical synods and
councils also sought to reform church rituals, especially in the decade of the
1770s. Several religious orders published constitutions which regulated the use of
music in religious indoctrination of the indigenous population, with severe
penalties imposed for misuse. Moreover, irreligious European and Asian musical
genres were periodically banned from performance in Manila. The drastic reform
of feast days made in 1737 by Archbishop Juan Ángel Rodríguez also brought
about changes in musical usage and performance throughout the year, whilst
attempts by other archbishops to control certain prayers and rites—and by
extension their musical expression—led to controversy. This paper examines the
unique set of circumstances in this Spanish colony which resulted in the
formulation of such strict guidelines for music performance, and considers the
social and cultural implications of this governance
Arnold JACOBSHAGEN (Bayreuth)
Staging Grand Opéra in nineteenth century Paris: Louis Palianti and the myth of
the original mise en scène
The Parisian stage-direction books are indispensable sources for the
reconstruction of nineteenth-century operatic productions. Recent scholars on the
so-called livrets de mise-en-scène summarized their conclusions to the effect that
opera direction was characterized by the continuous conservation of the original
staging from the Paris premières. Nevertheless, conceptualizing production
history as static seems inappropriate for several reasons: technical improvements
in the areas of stage-machinery and lighting, for example, made perpetual
changes in productions necessary, and the musical contents and the dramatic
disposition of individual operas were constantly being altered. Furthermore, the
institutional framework and staging customs differed considerably among the
Parisian operatic theatres. Including stage directions for around 200 different
operatic works, Louis Palianti’s Collection de Mises en Scène is one of the most
comprehensive sources for nineteenth century operatic staging. Comparing
examples from several of Palianti’s livrets de mise-en-scène, I will discuss some
significant tendencies in the evolution of staging practices at the different
institutions of opera in Paris from the July Revolution to the end of the Second
Empire. As I will conclude, the idea of an “authentic” and immutable staging has
to be seen in relative terms: as a retrospective projection of modern concepts,
but certainly not as a part of 19th century operatic reality.
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Julian JOHNSON (St Anne’s College, Oxford)
Dent Medal lecture. Music as Self-Critique: The Case of Mahler
My starting point is a familiar conception of Mahler’s music, as one which
foregrounds a certain self-consciousness about its own capacity for expression.
Mahler constantly affirms the expressive power of music, and yet at the same
time constantly undermines itself and calls into question its own propositions. The
means by which he does this are well known – his borrowings from other musics
(popular, military, classical), his strategies of exaggeration, deformation and
stylisation, his use of cliché and deliberate naiveté, his hybrid forms and mixing
of genre types. In short, the cumulative effect of Mahler’s plural voices is
understood to undermine the notion of authorial voice that his symphonies
nevertheless propose.
The idea of self-critique is thus at the heart of Mahler’s music. It is this that binds
his music both to early romanticism and to postmodernism at the same time. My
paper examines the way such an idea is played out, not in the obvious moments
of stylistic parody and distortion, but rather in those aspects of the music that are
presented ‘as if’, by contrast, their affirmation of an expressive, authorial voice
were indeed authentic. Mahler makes a fascinating case study here; he becomes
a kind of historical prism through which one might see refracted both much
earlier music and much later music. His symphonic affirmations, for example, not
only draw attention self-consciously to their own constructed nature, but
retrospectively cast doubt upon the models on which they are based. Mahler thus
calls Beethoven into question. Seen through a Mahlerian lens, the profoundly
modern element of self-critique in Beethoven becomes more prominent. Viewing
Beethoven’s Ninth through Mahler’s Second, for example, draws out the extent to
which an affirmation of music’s expressive capacity, precisely in its boldest, most
confident moments, is deeply riven by a self-awareness of its own constructed
and artificial nature.
Roy JOHNSTON (Independent scholar)
Carl Rosa and the gilded elephants: the genesis, decline and
resurrection of a provincial opera house
The touring opera company occupies a significant place in the history of opera
performance in the provinces. A revival of interest in the theatre in general in the
middle of the 19th century induced J F Warden to knock down his 18th-century
theatre in Belfast and open a new one in 1871. His enterprise was rewarded, but
he was not prepared for the succession of outstanding opera seasons given in the
1880s and 1890s by the Carl Rosa and other touring companies. Warden,
convinced that the city could carry an additional, purpose-built theatre,
commissioned Frank Matcham. The Grand Opera House, in the general design
and detail of its construction, epitomised the great era of British theatre
construction. The first opera season was given in September 1896 by what had
become the Royal Carl Rosa Opera Company. Warden’s second initiative,
however, was unsuccessful. The opera boom had passed its peak, not the least of
the reasons being a decline in creativity in the art-form itself. Over the years of
the new century rising costs and other reasons brought about the demise of the
touring opera companies, including eventually the Carl Rosa itself. The Grand
Opera House, for reasons not wholly to do with opera, went into the decline all
too familiar in the theatres of the British Isles, and it closed in the 1970s. Sold to
a speculator, it was on the verge of demolition when a unique combination of
circumstances brought about its rescue, and its reconstruction to a working
theatre in something of its late-Victorian grandeur.
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Berta JONCUS, (St Catherine’s College, Oxford)
‘Of all the Arts that sooth’: Imaging Kitty Clive (1711-1785)
The coordination of portraiture with musical roles was vital to the success of star
soprano Kitty Clive. Visual promotion of Clive served different functions at
different stages of her career: invention (for ballad opera, 1729-32), assertion
(for high-style English song, 1734-39); apotheosis (for music by Handel and
Arne, 1740), and parody (for musical burlesque, 1748-69). London’s theatrical,
musical and print industries worked together to construct Clive’s star persona and
ring its changes.
Following the trend set by John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728), Clive was initially
portrayed as Gay’s lead soprano Lavinia Fenton had been, that is, as a sexually
available nymph – though the first Clive ‘portrait’ of 1729 was not actually a
likeness of her. Frontispieces to the ballad opera Damon and Phillida likewise
dealt in a false Clive image by suggesting she was popular as Phillida when in fact
she rarely appeared in this role. From 1732 Clive followed her huge success in
ballad opera by distinguishing herself in more elevated English song, and was
faithfully depicted in mezzotints praising her vocal skills. Her most lavish portrait
(1740) broadcast her by now mythic status as London’s ‘Sweet Bird’ by showing
her holding Handel’s eponymous aria. Musical parody dominated Clive’s last two
decades on stage, and as ‘Mrs. Riot’ (from Lethe, 1748) she appeared on
watchpapers and in porcelain and oil as well as engraving.
Lois KIVESTO (Education Consultant: CanStage and Factory Theatre in
Toronto, Ontario, Canada)
‘Sunday in the Park with George’: The First Collaboration of Stephen Sondheim
and James Lapine
James Lapine is considered by Stephen Sondheim to be unequaled as a suitable
candidate for carrying the dual role of librettist-director while developing a new
work. Sondheim's interest in the 1981 New York Shakespeare Festival production
of Twelve Dreams, written and directed by Lapine, prompted the balanced and
productive collaboration which ensued.
Beginning with a brief presentation of Lapine's biographical background, including
his initial career in graphic design and his subsequent work in the theatre, the
paper examines the development of Sunday in the Park with George. The
collaboration of Sondheim and Lapine is followed, from the selection of Georges
Seurat's pointillist painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,
as a thematic basis; through the weaving of music and lyrics into the textual
'fabric'; through readings and the workshop production at Playwrights Horizons;
and ultimately the Broadway production, its critical reception, and its accolades.
Research materials obtained from published sources have been supplemented by
personal and telephone interviews with the following subjects: Lapine; Sondheim;
actors Barbara Bryne and Bernadette Peters; scenic designer Tony Straiges; and
(previously of Playwrights Horizons), Lincoln Center Theater artistic director
André Bishop, and musical theatre associate producer, Ira Weitzman.
Linda KOUVARAS (University of Melbourne)
The Outback in the Himalayas: Tropes of Identity and Landscape in Australian
Composer Stuart Greenbaum’s Ice Man
This project was funded by the ARC
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White Australian tropes of “Australian-ness” are frequently bound-up in notions of
what is arguably Australia’s most powerful cultural myth, variously termed “the
land”, “the outback”, or “the bush”, and have been represented in works of art
across all genres since Settlement. A highly visually informed contemporary
musical work is Ice Man (1993), for piano solo, by Australian Composer Stuart
Greenbaum (b. 1966). Ice Man portrays an enduring Australian mythology: the
sole male explorer and his plight – spiritual and physical. Here, the “explorer” is
the Australian adventurer, James Scott, who was lost in the Himalayan snow for
43 days in 1992. While the Himalayas are obviously a far distance from
Australia, nevertheless the idea of humans pitted against the unforgiving, wild
and dangerous – yet compellingly seductive – elements has been very much a
constant preoccupation of settled Australia. This work explores our imagined
collective relationship with the outback through compositional devices which
include tonally-based structures, bitonality, motivic workings, and minimalist
cyclic structures. I examine its use of metaphorical connections between music
and visual connotations in its exploration of a diaristic, inner, psychological space,
one which generates an idiosyncratic sense of psychic isolation. The work thus
highlights a typical dualistic attitude harboured by city dwellers, namely one of
simultaneous yearning for, and repulsion in abject horror toward, the outback.
Elizabeth KRAMER (University of West Georgia)
Authenticity in Visual Art, Authenticity in Music: Raphael’s Transfiguration and
Mozart’s Requiem in German Aesthetics of the Early Nineteenth Century
Authorship disputes have dominated discussions about two great works of art,
Raphael’s Transfiguration of Christ and Mozart’s Requiem. Our motivations for
such inquiries today, healthy skepticism for the meaning of authenticity aside,
may seem obvious. But what inspired prior debates, especially those of the early
nineteenth century? This paper explores the nature of early-nineteenth century
judgments of authenticities in visual and musical products, showing them to be
results of interactions between historical and critical discourses about visual art
and music. Although questions about the authenticity of Raphael’s altarpiece had
circulated since the artist’s death, they gained a new hearing in music criticism
around 1800. Writers such as Wackenroder and Tieck, Rochlitz,
E. T. A. Hoffmann and G. Weber discussed the lives and works of painters from
the Renaissance and musicians from their time, evoking sacralized
understandings of the artist, the work, and the act of writing history and
criticism. These sacralized ideas proliferated in widespread debate about the
authenticity of Mozart’s Requiem in the 1820s as critics sought hermeneutical
guidelines for judgments about the aesthetic and historical worth of a composition
characterized by one of its interlocutors as receiving more “universal” and
“adoring worship” than any other of Mozart’s works.
Jonathan KREGOR (Harvard)
From Partition to Hausmusik: Franz Liszt’s Symphonie fantastique and the Berlin
firm of A. M. Schlesinger
Franz Liszt had been expected for years before finally passing into north-German
territory in the early 1840s—the German press had been monitoring his concerts,
publishing firms began to issue his compositions, and critics were taking him
seriously as an artist. Biographers often suggest that his
transcription of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique inaugurated this
escalating German interest in the two composers. But while technical features of
Liszt’s arrangement and Schumann’s famous 1835 article have received
considerable scholarly attention, the history of the work as a vehicle for
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dissemination remains unclear. How did this French publication end up on northGerman soil? In what form(s) was the work released? Since Liszt rarely
performed the work publicly, who spearheaded its publication? The Berlin
publishing firm of A. M. Schlesinger accounted for a large part of the work’s
success abroad. Schlesinger converted Liszt’s stupendously difficult stage
creations into pieces suitable for consumption by his domestic music-making
clientele. Heretofore unknown letters and a four-hand arrangement of the
“Marche” movement from Schlesinger’s firm document this practice. The
transmission history of Liszt’s Symphonie fantastique reflects a virtuoso who, with
the help of an able publisher, could sustain audience accessibility without
sacrificing his artistic vision and its execution.
David LARKIN (Christ’s College, Cambridge)
‘Deeds of Music [almost] made Visible’: Realisations of the Extra-Musical in
Strauss’s Tone Poems
‘No one has gone further than Strauss in enabling us to see with our ears’, wrote
the critic Rudolf Louis in 1909. Strauss’s gift for creating musical analogues for
his extra-musical programmes was such that some critics drew comparisons
between the tone poems and visual art forms. For instance, when faced with the
graphic realism of Tod und Verklärung, Hanslick compared it to a pantomime, a
magic lantern show, and, unsurprisingly, to music drama. In this paper I will
focus in detail on Tod und Verklärung (1889) and on Don Quixote (1897), and
examine the methods Strauss used in each to convey the programmatic content.
Although the trajectory of Strauss’s career after the turn of the century led him to
music drama—described by Wagner as ‘deeds of music made visible’—I argue
that the move from symphonic composition to operatic writing was not inevitably
foreordained by the strategies Strauss employed in his orchestral works. Indeed,
certain aspects of these works, such as the mixture of narrative perspectives, the
non-linear temporal presentation, and the alternation between diegetic and
mimetic modes, seem to adumbrate a different visual art form: the cinema.
Dennis LEO (University of Nottingham)
Sublime Alienation: Australian Landscape, Australian Identity and Michael
Finnissy’s Red Earth
Ever since Europeans first set foot on the continent the Australian landscape has
been a thorny and complex space of contested sites, identities, and ideals. It is
therefore unsurprising that constructions and representations of the landscape
have been an integral part of Australian culture — both Aboriginal and nonAboriginal — for the last two centuries. Nevertheless, much of the critical
attention has focussed on the visual arts (perhaps for obvious reasons), even
though notions of landscape are equally crucial to, and problematic for, Australian
music. Recently, though, critics and scholars have started investigating the
ambiguous relationship between Australian contemporary music and the
Australian landscape, asking how musical approaches to landscape may
participate in either constructing or critiquing a particular sense of Australian
postcolonial identity.
Continuing this recent work, this paper, perhaps unusually, investigates a piece
by a British composer – Michael Finnissy’s orchestral work Red Earth – and
assesses its connection to the Australian ‘outback’. It begins by investigating
theories of the relationship between landscape, space and colonialism, as well as
critical work on music and landscape, before going on to examine different
aspects of Finnissy’s work, contrasting it with some other important responses to
the Australian landscape by Australian composers, such as Peter Sculthorpe’s
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well-known orchestral landscapes. Finally, this paper suggests that Red Earth
offers an important and critically aware musical representation of the Australian
landscape, one which, through its refusal of normalised approaches to landscape
composition, presents an immanent critique of the complex relationship between
Australian landscapes, histories, and identities.
Michael LONG (State University of New York, Buffalo)
Slow-dancing on Brokeback Mountain
Gustavo Santaolalla’s original score for Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain has been
celebrated for its musical evocation of those elements of the film – atmosphere,
emotion, “the story” – that are of primary interest to non-specialist critics of film
music. This paper will consider the score more carefully against the background
of Santaolalla’s personal style, context, and working methods, and will address at
length the now-familiar “slow waltz” theme (“The Wings”) that was, by the
agency of abbreviated presentations in advertising and award shows, quickly
lodged in the popular imagination as an index of affect and meaning even for
those who had not seen the film.
Lee’s Brokeback project was especially attractive to Santaolalla who has placed
diversity (the musical “rainbow”) at the center of his aesthetics for decades. His
characteristic mixing of ethnographically inflected musical vocabularies is evident
in the principal expressive modes encountered in the score: an historically
appropriate torch-and-twang American country idiolect (bar music) and another,
more abstractly “folkloric,” assigned primarily to the guitar and ranging from
Latin to Asian in its cultural resonances. But while in interviews the composer has
praised Brokeback Mountain’s ethical position with respect to its subject matter
as significant and laudable, he has not pointed to any acoustic space in which we
might locate the film’s quite specific and controversial elements of difference. Can
the score be outed? If not, would it not have failed in a rather remarkable and
even unconscionable way?
I will argue that Brokeback Mountain realizes multimedia’s capacity for parabolic
expression and transforms by sensory extension certain ancient categories
devoted to unclear and hidden truths, e.g., parabole, aenigma, mashal, and koan.
Suggesting further that a musical enigma (in both scriptural and Elgarian senses)
haunts the film’s “big” theme, I argue that Santaolalla has pressed the score’s
operation into a zone beyond univocal narrative or representation, making room
for alternative positions of musical reception, in and out of the closet of
conventional filmic listening.
Henry MacCARTHY (Ohio University)
Visualizing the Americas: Spanish Musical Theater and the Colonial Imagination
Representations of the Americas as a site for the primitive and exotic constituted
a fundamental component of the Spanish colonial endeavor. Soon after Columbus
arrived in the new world, Spain developed a series of discursive practices to
construct idyllic versions of America that permeate Spanish society to this day. In
this paper I examine how zarzuela, a Spanish musical theater genre that
combines sung and spoken text usually with dance numbers, imagined the
Americas.
Drawing from selected nineteenth-century zarzuela lyrics I analyze how America
was performed in Spanish musical theatre. Further, I explore the roles played by
the imagined Americas in constructions of desire in Spanish zarzuela—including,
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but not limited to, courtship rituals. Likewise, I trace the relationship between
desire and the colonial subject—in which images of the mulata played a central
role. Ultimately, I seek to analyze zarzuela’s visual codes that identified,
controlled and negotiated the Americas.
Hugh MacDONALD (Washington University, St Louis)
Modernisms That Failed
Stories of twentieth-century music have consistently concentrated on certain
admired and successful examples of modernism, often to the exclusion of
despised reactionary styles. But a number of remarkable modernisms have been
neglected for the plain reason that they failed to attract the serious attention of
composers and critics when they were first offered to the public, or because the
technical or linguistic base on which they were posited could not sustain a
workable tradition of composition. Many experiments belonged inevitably to the
lunatic fringe, even when the musical results were promising. The turn of the
twentieth century witnessed a variety of radical advances in the creation of new
scales and in experiments with other art-forms, and after 1918 composers
embraced the peace with the optimisim of explorers in a new continent. What
these modernisms have in common is their failure to generate an afterlife, and
especially their failure to impress the arbiters of musical taste in the second half
of the twentieth century. This paper will consider such ephemeral phenomena as
color music, microtonal music, and machine music, and will seek to identify the
cultural forces that condemned them to fade out of sight
Tomi MÄKELÄ (University of Magdeburg)
The Nordic Landscape and Sibelius in the Context of the Cultural Geography
The conviction that Finnish landscapes correspond with the music of Sibelius and
that familiarity with the Nordic life-style helps to enjoy this music is not limited to
the intellectual twilight of the 1930s. Already 1910 Lucien Price, a Boston
journalist, confronted Sibelius with a questionnaire, including a selection of topics,
which can be incorporated in a geographically and culturally oriented musicology.
Since the 1980s the emphasis of the Sibelius-research leans heavily towards
music theory, but this does not alter the basic assumption that the music of
Sibelius is primarily linked with Finland. Consequently, Marc Vignal (Jean Sibelius,
2004) begins his biography with the statement: “La Finlande est un pays
possédant une longue histoire, mais assez jeune comme nation et encore plus
comme État souverain.” Sibelius’s position was also strong. In 1942 he told
Helmuth von Hase that he would never accept a biography by anyone who had
not stayed in Finland together with him and who had not learned to know the
country and its people. This proposal compares documents of Sibelius reception
with premises of what is nowadays called “humanist” or cultural geography and
recently applied to The Idea of North by Peter Davidson (2005).
Kate MAXWELL (University of Glasgow)
"Quant jeus tout recorde par ordre": the visual presentation of the music in
Guillaume de Machaut's Remede de Fortune
In From Song to Book, Sylvia Huot argues that the visual presentation of
Machaut’s Remede de Fortune in the two surviving copies most likely produced
during his lifetime (manuscripts C and A) reflects a progression over some twenty
years from Machaut-amant to Machaut-poète: the iconography of the miniatures
shifts emphasis from lover/performer to author/writer. Whereas Huot bases her
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arguments chiefly on narrative-miniature relations, in this paper I investigate the
extent to which the visual presentation of the lyrics and their music in the
Remede's songs corroborates her view by reflecting a parallel progression from
singer-performer to reader-performer. I present evidence for the proposition that
in the earlier manuscript the manner in which the copyists enter words and music
suggests music’s visual presence on the page rather than its sounding
performance, whereas in the later manuscript scribes and readers alike seem to
be performing inwardly that which they are notating, reading and, perhaps,
recalling. These conclusions not only permit a more nuanced view of what
Machaut meant in the Remede by "when I had recalled everything properly"; they
also have implications for our understanding of the shifting relationship between
words and music in the fourteenth century.
Nanette NIELSEN (University of East Anglia)
‘Should politics be sung?’: voice and ethics in Bekker and Weill
In Das Deutsche Musikleben of 1916, the German music critic and opera producer
Paul Bekker (1882-1937) formulated his groundbreaking sociological theory of
music and introduced an 'ethical aesthetics' in which music featured as the most
crucial creative power within society. Furthermore, through his conception of
‘voice’, Bekker formulated in musical terms a growing disenchantment with a
society that suffered from heightened political fragmentation; by 1934, Bekker’s
project was to give the voice back to human beings, as individuals in society.
With a focus on Weill’s 1932 opera Die Bürgschaft, this paper explores Bekker’s
notion of ‘voice’ as ethical enactment and expression. Included is an investigation
of previously unexplored original documents and correspondence surrounding
Bekker’s 1932 production of this opera. l also draw on Bekker’s 1932 criticism of
Weill – only a year before the opera was banned by the Nazis – in which he
returns to Die Bürgschaft and asks whether politics should be sung. As a work
embedded with political intent, the tension between the individual and the
masses in Die Bürgschaft becomes a powerful operatic manifestation of a
widening gap between ethics and politics.
Debra PRING (Goldsmiths)
Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts—Music Iconography in Harmen Steenwyck’s Vanitas
with Antique Sculpture
For Dutch vanitas painters of the 17th century, the choice of musical instruments
was, as with all of the objects within their paintings, carefully governed by what
we take to be a certain type of intended narrative. However, through the very
tendency to assign certain still life paintings automatically to the category
‘vanitas’, we predispose our readings of their objects to be located within an
over-arching theme of morality. Thus, at the site of the painting, questions of
genre meet with those of interpretation and intention. This paper will examine
these issues in relation to Harmen Steenwyck’s so-called Vanitas with Antique
Sculpture (c.1650). Steenwyck is unique in that every one of his vanitas paintings
includes a recorder and, because the number of his surviving paintings is
relatively small, it is possible to construct an inventory of objects that seem to
have been available to him in his studio. Thus the recorder was probably selected
for the combined reasons of painterly arrangement, symbolic function and
pragmatic convenience. This paper will situate those selection criteria within a
wider remit of construing the work as a multi-layered reflection of the beliefs of
the seventeenth-century Dutch viewer with classical, biblical and colonial
perspectives.
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Caroline RAE (University of Cardiff)
Alejo Carpentier and the Promotion of New Music in pre-Revolutionary Cuba
The Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) is well known as one of the
founders of the so-called ‘boom’ in Latin American literature, his novels including
The Kingdom of this World (El reino de este mundo, 1949) and The Lost Steps
(Los pasos perdidos , 1953) having secured his international reputation during
the 1950s and 1960s. A contender for the Nobel Prize on several occasions, he is
now placed among the giants of twentieth-century world literature, as well as
being a hero of Castro’s Cuba. While the importance of music in Carpentier’s
writings, both fictional and critical, has long been recognised, little attention has
been given to the deeper significance of his musical activities and involvements.
During the years of his creative apprenticeship in the 1920s and 1930s, he was
closely involved with members of the musical, as well as literary, avant-garde.
Writing music criticism for two of the leading Latin American journals of the time,
Social and Carteles of Cuba, Carpentier’s early critical writings reveal his
knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, new music of the age.
This paper will examine Carpentier’s collaborations with his Cuban
compatriot, the composer Amadeo Roldán, and their joint founding in 1926 of the
first society for the promotion of new music in Cuba, Musica Nueva. Together with
Roldán, Carpentier was responsible for organising the first Cuban performances of
works by Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Ravel, Goossens, Poulenc, Malipiero and many
others. The importance of Carpentier’s innovations will be assessed in terms of
the other Cuban musical organisations which were influenced by his commitment
to new music.
Stephen RICE (Wolfson College, Oxford)
Musical Aesthetics in Motets of the ‘Generation in-between’, c. 1525-1550
Between the death of Josquin Desprez in 1521 and the earliest publications of
Orlandus Lassus in the 1550s lies the work of a generation of composers whose
contribution has largely been marginalized by music historians. Josquin’s music is
often interpreted in terms of its economy of construction; that of Lassus in
relation to rhetorical modes of expression. Few, however, have attempted to
elucidate the compositional aesthetic of the mid-century Franco-Flemings: the
music is often seen as undifferentiated in texture and lacking in the Humanist
relationship with its texts that both earlier and later composers are said to
achieve. This paper will address that absence of critical engagement and offer
new analytical perspectives.
The paper will examine briefly the extent to which a neo-Burmeisterian approach
can be applied retrospectively to this repertory. Although certain of Burmeister’s
categories can readily be found in the music, there is no evidence that composers
used them systematically. More useful is a larger-scale view, which takes a motet
as a unit and considers aspects such as tessitura, dissonance and melodic
organization in relation to the entire text. From this standpoint the aesthetic goals
of mid-century composers can be productively reconsidered.
Annette RICHARDS (Cornell University)
Keynote Lecture:
Picturing the Moment in Sound: C. P. E. Bach and the Musical Portrait
The musical portrait is a contested genre. It represents both too obvious an
imitation of the extra-musical, mere musikalische Malerei, while simultaneously
its depiction of its subject necessarily hovers between the individual and the
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general, the specific character and the universal characteristic, rarely approaching
the unique likeness of a painted image. C. P. E. Bach’s own essays in the genre of
musical portraiture (Berlin 1754-58) depict not only generalized characters (in
the manner of French character pieces) but also particular individuals among
Bach’s circle of friends; they were anthologized and widely disseminated during
his lifetime, yet some years later Bac h himself expressed an ambivalent attitude
toward these celebrated experiments.
While the social context for these pieces has been studied, what remains to be
explored is both their important relation to visual culture at the Berlin court of
Frederick the Great, whose collecting of French portraiture and genre painting
amounted to an obsession, and the extraordinary currency of the musical portrait
(especially as visual object) in the later life of Bach – himself an avid collector
who fostered the artistic ambitions of his talented son, and left a breathtaking
collection of nearly 300 painted and engraved portraits of musicians and other
cultural figures at his death.
One of the crucial aspects of contemporary French genre painting and portraiture
was the idea of the distillation of a moment: small intimate paintings such as
Chardin’s “petits sujets” or “petits tableaux” offered a private glimpse of life
momentarily suspended. Bach would have seen works by Chardin and Watteau,
among many others, in the palaces of Frederick the Great. Drawing on
contemporary art theory as well as the lively critical discourse in Paris and Berlin,
this paper shows how, like their visual analogues, Bach’s character pieces of the
1750s, designated by Bach himself as Petites Piéces, represent early explorations
of the idea of frozen time. In some sense transcending the painting as they play
out character in time, these pieces simultaneously crystallize the visual into a
series of musical moments, pointing forward to Bach’s later exploration of this
idea in works such as the “Abschied” Rondo, H. 300, or the C major Fantasia H.
291, whose extraordinary endings freeze the player’s final gesture and fill the
visual space of performance with dying sound or even silence, like a bubble th at
can never quite burst.
It seems appropriate that Bach’s final act as a collector was the creation of his
own self-portrait – the F-sharp minor fantasy, H. 300. This work returns the
discussion to Bach’s famous (and hitherto unstudied) portrait collection, and
shows how Bach’s earlier intimate musical portrayals give way in his collection of
musical (and non-musical) portraits to a grander vision of character. The portrait
collection — a history of music and other arts pieced together, mosaic-like, from
hundreds of individual faces — amounts to nothing less than the physiognomy of
European, and especially German, culture. Here, the frozen moment is expanded
to an equally timeless eternity of artistic achievement.
Fiona RICHARDS (Open University)
Illawarra Music
This paper looks at music associated with the Illawarra region, New South Wales,
and seeks to examine the different ways in which composers have responded to
this part of the Australian landscape, its industrial, coastline, mountain and valley
aspects, often in association with other visual stimuli. The subject will be
approached through a series of case studies as outlined below:
Andrew Schultz (b. 1960) lives and works in the major city of the Illawarra,
Wollongong, and has produced several works influenced by this landscape,
among them Dead Songs (1991), Sea Call (1988) and Barren Grounds (1988).
Further inland is Cambewarra Mountain and over a number of years David
Lumsdaine (b. 1931) has made many recordings in all seasons in this place. Two
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composers have turned more to the industrial side of the region. John Peterson
(b. 1957) has produced a number of works based on 1950s black and white
photographs of industrial Wollongong, among them Port Kembla (1998), Illawarra
Music (2000) and Liquid Steel (2002). Matthew Hindson (b. 1968) grew up in a
region dominated by the steelworks at Port Kembla, briefly working there and
subsequently producing his Industrial Night Music (String Quartet No.1) (2003). A
short distance inland, ‘Bundanon’ was the home of the eminent Australian
painter, Arthur Boyd. Many composers have had the opportunity to work here,
creating pieces associated with the centre, the region and Boyd’s paintings.
Inge van RIJ (Victoria University, Wellington, NZ)
‘All art is the same and speaks the same language’: Brahms’s song collections
and the graphic cycles of Max Klinger.
When Brahms received Max Klinger’s graphic cycle entitled Brahms-Phantasien
he wrote to the artist: ‘I must conclude … that all art is the same and speaks the
same language.’ Occasional attempts have been made to account for the
composer’s attraction to this collection and to Klinger’s art generally, but one
significant area has so far been overlooked: the relationship between Klinger’s
graphic cycles and Brahms ’s song collections. Brahms dedicated his Vier ernste
Gesänge op. 121 to Klinger and the artist dedicated his Brahms-Phantasien –
which include illustrations of several of Brahms’s songs – to the composer. The
Vier ernste Gesänge are unusual amongst Brahms’s song collections in that they
are sometimes viewed as a song cycle, whereas most of the other collections are
usually dismissed as more or less random groupings. However, the composer
himself referred to his song collections generally as ‘bouquets’, implying an
element of coherence in the arrangements. An examination of Brahms’s opp. 49
and 86 song collections and Klinger’s Brahms-Phantasien reveals that the
exchange of dedications is symbolic of a deeper relationship between the
approaches of Brahms and Klinger to their respective media. Klinger’s graphic
cycles can help us to understand the complex relationship to narrative, the
subtlety of interrelationships between individual numbers, the self-reflexivity, and
the autobiographical allusions of Brahms’s song collections, thus enabling us to
appreciate both the significance of Brahms’s term ‘song bouquet’ and his
admiration of Klinger’s art.
Matthew RILEY (University of Birmingham)
Musical Landscapes of the Fantastic and the Uncanny in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s
Lebensansichten des Katers Murr
E. T. A. Hoffmann’s unfinished masterpiece Lebensansichten des Katers Murr
(1820–22) is full of landscapes that resound with music and are occupied by a
musician—Johannes Kreisler. These settings help to illustrate Hoffmann’s view of
the unstable position of the modern artist in contemporary society. After
abandoning his salaried post as Kapellmeister at the seat of the powerful local
duke, Kreisler takes refuge in the picturesque landscape park at Sieghartshof, the
dysfunctional court of a redundant princeling. Yet the artificial wilderness of the
park contains dangers of its own for Kreisler, and he is forced to escape once
again. The setting of the sun (Hoffmann’s symbol for the absolute) over this
landscape alters its meaning from fantastic to uncanny, indicating Kreisler’s
precarious existence between inspiration and madness. Beyond the boundaries of
the park, the Geierstein mountain and a nearby Benedictine abbey promise
freedom and peace for the artist, although it is unclear whether Hoffmann would
have allowed Kreisler finally to achieve this state had he lived to complete the
novel.
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Holly ROGERS (University College Dublin)
Beyond the frame: music and image in video installation art
The creators of video installation art are often both artist and musician. Able to
create image as well as music, such practitioners represent a radical and
important break with the traditional artist / musician divide that exists in other
audio-visual genres such as film. In order to trace the development that led to
video installation, however, one needs to investigate around the edge of art and
music; to explore not the forms themselves, but rather the changing nature of
the spaces in which they exist; spaces that were evolving radically during the
1960s. As music attempted to break its spatial bonds and art its temporal ones
during this time, the two forms began to overflow into each other. Janus-faced,
video installation rests at the intersection of these two expanding disciplines, a
collaboration, I propose, of sound, image and space. In order to illustrate this,
this paper will focus on the so-called “first wave” of video installation art (19631976) and, in particular, on the work of Nam June Paik. One of the first to explore
this new audio-visual space in his TV sculptures, Paik represents an important
step in the merging of music and art in the Twentieth Century.
Colin ROUST (University of Michigan)
The Lost Years: Georges Auric’s Film Scores of the 1930s and 1940s
Today, Auric’s name conjures up two images—the enfant terrible of the 1920s
and the master administrator of the 1950s and ‘60s. Auric’s life in the 1930s and
‘40s, however, is typically written off with some sort of variation on “he devoted
himself to film music.” The implication is clear—he abandoned his artistic
potential and vitality by turning to the lucrative commercialism of cinema. Yet,
the political aspects of Auric’s turn to cinema are precisely what connect the postWorld War I avant-gardist to the mid-century establishment figure and are what
current images of Auric’s career lack. His film music of these two decades reflects
and expresses his thoughts concerning three issues that proved to be central to
the rest of his career. First, his attention to intellectual property rights—
particularly after the success of A Nous, la Liberté!—began to bear fruit in the
1950s. Second, his sense of French musical nationalism transformed significantly
during the 1930s and ‘40s. Finally, his film music of this period was intricately
tied to the political agendas of the French Left and, during World War II, that of
the Resistance.
Pieter SCHOONDERWOERD (University of Nottingham)
Zwartboek – A cross-cultural exposition in film-scoring
Currently in post-production, and due for release this autumn, Hollywood veteran,
Paul Verhoeven’s new film, Zwartboek (Black Book), represents a return to the
kind of low-budget, Dutch productions which characterised his early career.
Dealing with the deportation and murder of over 110,000 Dutch Jews during
World War II, and suggesting duplicitous involvement of Dutch citizens in this
tragedy, the film provides a pointed allegorical reminder that, at a time when
identity and ‘othering’ are prevalent questions for contemporary society,
renowned Dutch liberalism and tolerance has seen darker days.
Given the specific socio-cultural focus to this Dutch language film then, the
choice of composer may seem surprising – Anne Dudley, better known as
founding member of the Art of Noise and 1998 Academy award ‘Best Soundtrack’
winner for The Full Monty. Drawing on a personal interview with the composer, I
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will examine both the logistical difficulties in producing the music and the crosscultural sensitivities required when scoring for a film whose cultural relatedness
and language setting are not one’s own. I will pay particular attention to
directorial requirements, compositional freedom and the challenges presented by
different linguistic idiomatics to consider the ways in which a composer adapts to
or overcomes these issues.
Nathan SEINEN (Clare College, Cambridge)
Buffered by buffa?: Prokofiev’s Betrothal in a Monastery
Most commentators have claimed that Prokofiev’s ‘lyric-comic opera’ Betrothal in
a Monastery (1940-43) was composed as a retreat from the demands of socialist
realism after a poor reception given to Semyon Kotko (1939) in the Soviet music
press. Yet this assessment does not stand up to the evidence, and – typical of a
great deal of writing on Soviet music – has allowed assumptions about political
causes to precede or even determine aesthetic appraisal. A more relevant and
fruitful point of departure would be to study the work within the context of
Prokofiev’s unique approach to opera and his later stylistic development.
Betrothal corresponds to the composer’s usual practice of ‘updating’ traditional
operatic genres, while its particular take on tradition is characteristic of his
mature talent and temperament. This paper will evaluate the opera’s
relationships to its literary source (Sheridan’s The Duenna) and its operatic
models (Mozart, Rossini, and Verdi), and consider its kinship with Prokofiev’s
contemporary works in other genres. Composed before the composer felt strongly
the demands of official pressure, and clearly in accordance with his own
preferences, Betrothal is not the result of a conflict with Soviet music policy but
instead suggests a potential rapport with it.
Tim SHEPHARD (University of Nottingham)
Rebus – Synthesis – Dionysus: the Bacchanal of the Andrians
Renaissance musical scholarship concerned with visual art has tended to take
what one might term an iconographical approach, using visual sources to garner
information on the physical appearance of musicians and instruments, or on the
use of music in religious and courtly life. Little attention is given to what Lowinsky
once championed as ‘musical iconology’ – the ways in which music might interact
with the content of a visual context – beyond allegory and the sexual
connotations of certain wind instruments. Could a poetic synthesis of music and
art be charted in a meaningful way?
The paintings illustrating classical texts made to decorate Duke Alfonso d’Este’s
study in the early 1500s make an interesting case study, rooted as they are in
the Giorgionesque – a visual style sometimes characterised as ‘musical’. Among
them, in Titian’s Andrians, we find depicted an enigmatic musical canon ascribed
to Willaert. Through a refinement of the decades-old view on the canon’s
resolution, this paper will trace the ways in which it and its visual context
converge in meaning via the symbolism of Dionysus. In the process, modern
conceptions of categories such as ‘music’, ‘art’, ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ will resolve
into a Renaissance interplay of poetry, performance and practicality
Danae STEFANOU (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Paradigms and Parables on how Music becomes Landscape
In everyday terms, ‘landscape’ has been associated with the depiction of a visible
or envisaged environment, and with notions of land and locality. Hence, in
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utilising the term in connection with music, one tends to deal with music’s
responsiveness to and representation of environmental parameters. This
approach, however, implies a one-way relation, whereby music is subservient to
what it embodies; furthermore, the implicit division between ‘music and
landscape’ essentially negates the possibility of a music that is, in itself, a kind of
landscape.
This paper argues for the re-introduction of greater semantic breadth to the term,
drawing on its various stages of evolution within art history and philosophy, and
revisiting the ancient Greek and Latin notions of topos / topia. Through a
synthesis of relevant paradigms, metaphors and narratives from Adorno, Simmel,
Deleuze, Serres and others, the paper presents new perspectives in the music /
landscape relation, revealing topicalities, utopias, or even ectopias, defined solely
by the timespace of a particular performance. It thus suggests that a ‘musical
landscape’ does not simply entail a second-hand enactment of a spatio-visual
impression, but an original landscape experience, shaped temporally and sonically
at every step of its creation.
Katherine SYER (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Digital Dreams: Wagner and 21st-Century Technology
Digital technologies have made a striking impact on recent opera production
practices. Wagner could not have envisioned how far practices would develop in
the generations after his death. Yet we can be confident that he appreciated
aspects of stagecraft that moved beyond the naturalistic renderings of the
phenomenal realm common in his time. All of Wagner’s major stage works
feature dramatic dimensions that posed major challenges to the technologies
then available.
While Wagner selectively employed electric light, the next technological wave
came with the advent of film. Many directors and designers explored new
possibilities, while obvious aesthetic questions emerged about the relationship
between technology and the arts. As a backdrop, this paper will revisit some of
the questions posed by the influential director Erwin Piscator as he began to
embrace new technologies in his stage productions of the later 1920s. Despite the
political profile of much of his work, he already wrestled with basic questions
about the suitability of production approaches that would appear relevant today.
A survey of several current Wagner productions that employ digital technologies
will bear in mind the composer’s vision of stagecraft, while considering the merits
of such approaches given the musico-dramatic structure of the works themselves.
Gwendolyn TIETZE (London)
Medieval music in the 1920s: art history and the ‘unity of the arts’
In the early twentieth century art history was a popular hunting ground for
musicologists looking for concepts and methods they could bring to bear on their
material: examples include Guido Adler’s importation of the notion of style and
the many uncritical applications of Alois Riegl’s Kunstwollen or Heinrich Wölfflin’s
Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe to musicological subjects.
Fired by the belief in the ‘indissoluble connection between all art forms’ (Curt
Sachs) these borrowings reached their zenith in the 1920s when, under the
mantle of Geistesgeschichte, a variety of scholars sought inspiration in art
history. For the historiography of medieval music this was perhaps more crucial
than for any other area of scholarship; there was a great perceived need for
models from outside musicology to support the development of an aesthetic
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context for the study and performance of a repertoire that had only recently
become accessible.
Through a consideration of the musicologists Arnold Schering and Rudolf Ficker
and their readings of the art historian Wilhelm Worringer, I shall explore some of
the topoi in the historiography of medieval music in the 1920s. Their writings
show the tensions between a fascination with medieval music on the one hand
and on the other an increasing systematisation of possible interpretations by predefined totalities. Historical processes become subordinated to pre-existing
concepts and ideal types, sometimes to the extent of creating a ‘music history
without music’. I show how these scholars operate with polarised systems
(abstraction vs. empathy or north vs. south), how they search for primeval
phenomena, for Romanesque and Gothic music and how they find ‘the Gothic
spirit’ and ‘medieval man’.
Tsan-Huang TSAI (Department of Ethnomusicology, Nanhua University, TAIWAN)
Reconstructing the Cosmological Landscape of Mythical China – The Case Study of
the Chinese Seven-stringed Zither
From the viewpoint of organological study, the construction of the Chinese sevenstringed zither (qin) is simple but fascinating due to its association with the
cosmological landscape of mythical Chinese thoughts. By using both historical and
ethnographical perspectives, this paper shows how the construction of this
instrument was embodied with the understanding of cosmological landscape
proposed by ancient Chinese scholars and is passed down to the present day qin
players. This paper does not limit the discussion to the relationship between the
instrument and landscape by means of representation, but also examines the
question of how and why the concept of landscape is regarded as being significant
in the context of qin practices.
Helena TYRVÄINEN (University of Helsinki)
Uuno Klami’s orchestral suite Pictures from Country Life – Village Festival:
pictorialism, identity and orchestral style
After studying composition in his native Finland and abroad (Paris 1924–25,
Vienna 1928–29), in a climate of increasingly intense nationalism, Uuno Klami
(1900–61) gave a concert of his own works in Helsinki in 1931. The distinguished
composer and critic Leevi Madetoja wrote: “Pan-European, he has seemingly
absorbed Europe, but it might have been profitable for his art if he had also
included a tiny corner of Finnish ground in it.” With the orchestral suites Sea
Pictures and Pictures from Country Life, Klami, until then a modernist and a
composer of non-representational music, included the generic term ‘picture’ in his
list of works in 1932 . It was timely for him to find a position in the Finnish
concert institution and to appeal to its audiences. Were these works a response to
Madetoja’s remark or at least an attempt to adjust to the new situation? This
paper will examine the sphere of representation Klami chose to share with his
fellow citizens and to study his technique, placing him in the context of
contemporary musical developments. The Finnish reception of Impressionism and
the identity of this composer, who was born near St Petersburg, will also be
discussed.
Simon WARNER (School of Music, University of Leeds)
Cover Versions: How Pop Art shaped the rock album sleeve
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This paper considers the marriage of Pop Art and the rock album sleeve in the
mid- to late-1960s. It investigates why artists became involved with popular
musicians and why bands felt they wished to ally themselves with significant
painters of the day. Among those works considered will be Andy Warhol's designs
for the Velvet Underground and the Rolling Stones, and the projects that Richard
Hamilton and Peter Blake undertook for the Beatles. The presentation will explore
the social, cultural and aesthetic issues at stake in these alliances. It will address
matters of binary opposition - the meeting of high and low practices - and
consider how far the Pop of art differed from the use of the term in respect of
music. Was Pop Art "the cultural flowering of postmodernism" as John Storey has
argued and, if so, how did rock music help to shape this creative history?
David WONG (open University)
The Confluence of Music, Literature and Cinema: a Comparative Approach to the
Aesthetics of Death in Tous les Matins du Monde
The urban geography of Sabah (Malaysia) has played a significant part in the
adoption of Western classical music genres amongst the Chinese people there.
Such cultural geography characteristics enhance the outward tendencies of the
Chinese communities to choose certain musical genres and disregard others. The
urban landscape of Sabah had very low population density until the early
twentieth-century when large numbers of Chinese immigrants began to arrive to
work on the land. Within one or two generations, some of them rose to become
landowners or to high political, legislative and community positions in the state.
While the overall geography has not changed over the centuries, the small
changes that have taken place on the western coastlines, including
reconstructions following the Second World War, can be considered as parallel to
the pace of progress (westernisation). The adoption of classical genre, illustrated
by the people's description of its characteristics, manifests the nature of this
musical culture. This paper explores themes on musical culture and the notions of
"place" (cultural geography) in Sabah, and relevant topics such as missiology,
language choice and history. Similar case studies from elsewhere are used for
comparison and contrast with respect to musical culture and urban geography