The Speaker:

John Michael Cooper, is the Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. He has published seventy world-premiere editions (in sixty volumes) of music by Florence B. Price with G. Schirmer and ten world-premiere editions of music by Margaret Bonds with Hildegard Publishing Company. His book,  Margaret Bonds: “The Montgomery Variations” and Du Bois “Credo,” is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. He is also the author of several books about Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and has published editions of Mendelssohn’s music with Bärenreiter, A-R Editions, Carus, and Ludwig Reichert.

Paper Abstract: 

Margaret Bonds’s lifelong work as advocate for racial justice and gender justice is well known, but the course of increasingly ambitious projects that she mounted in the service of those goals is not. This presentation situates her recently published orchestral masterpiece, The Montgomery Variations (1964), in the context of that series portraying the Variations as a series of snapshots of the Civil Rights movement including the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955), the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing (1963), and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  

The Speaker:

Holly Watkins: Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester

Paper Abstract: 

For centuries, music has occupied a variable place between such broad domains of human experience as theory and practice, art and science, concept and percept, and language and number. More recently, music has been plumbed for insights into our species’ evolutionary heritage and harnessed to post-humanist realignments of human music-making with nonhuman communication and the non-intentional dynamics of cultural transmission. The temporal logic of distant past and uncertain future that imbues the rhetorical pair pre-human and post-human seems altogether characteristic of an impending ecological disaster in which the humans responsible for climate change find themselves caught between too late and not yet. In dialogue with the philosophies of Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou, this paper navigates music’s complex geometry of betweenness (especially in regard to language and number) and inquires how that geometry might mutate in response to post-humanist temporalities—of which our own pandemic time is just one manifestation.

The Speaker:

Dwandalyn R. Reece is Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs and Supervisor Museum Curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. She brings more than 30 years of knowledge and experience in the museum field, including more than ten years at NMAAHC as Curator of Music and Performing Arts. In that role she built a collection of over 4,000 objects, curated the museum’s inaugural permanent exhibition, Musical Crossroads, for which she received the Secretary’s Research Prize in 2017, curated the museum’s grand opening music festival, Freedom Sounds, served as executive committee chair of  the pan-institutional group Smithsonian Music, and co-curated the Smithsonian Year of Music initiative in 2019. Prior to her tenure with NMAAHC, Dwan worked as a Senior Program Officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities. She ​also has worked previously as the Assistant Director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum, Chief Curator at the Brooklyn Historical Society, and Curator at the Motown Museum in Detroit. 

Abstract: 

Among the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s twelve permanent exhibitions stands Musical Crossroads, an overview of over 400 years of African American music-making from the time when the first enslaved Africans were brought to the Americas to the present. Through the exhibition’s 345 objects visitors have encountered stories that explore the creation, dissemination, and reception of a rich tapestry of musical creativity.  

The ways we engage with music is constantly evolving. Over the last three decades, countless number of museums, historic sites, libraries, and archives have built music collections for research, exhibition, and programming. As a universal mode of expression and creativity, music is the great equalizer in the human experience. From performance and scholarship, to the latest technological innovations, the multiple worlds that music inhabits is a culture unto itself. Within this movement to document, preserve, and interpret music’s existence, is a growing interest in music’s material culture, the tangible objects that are the material evidence of its existence.

In this lecture, Dr. Dwandalyn Reece will discuss her methodology of interpreting the history of African American music through the lens of its material culture.   Conceptualized around the idea that objects  deepen our understanding  of music’s meaning in a social, historical, and cultural context,  Reece will demonstrate how this approach opens up new possibilities in interpreting the meaning of music in African American life.

The Speaker:

Daphne Leong (University of Colorado Boulder).

Paper Abstract: 

Recent work, particularly Nicholas Cook’s Beyond the Score: Music as Performance, sets score or compositional product against music as performed. In this presentation, I argue that Grand Union, composed by Charles Wuorinen, is an exemplar of composition as performance—that is, that the composition itself embodies performance in some rather direct ways. Along the way, I will show how traits characteristic of Wuorinen’s writing contribute to this composed performance. I will further bring aspects of the composition into dialogue with actual performance.

The Speaker:

Alyssa Barna (University of Minnesota).

Paper Abstract: 

In post-millennial pop, the bridge as we knew it is gone. In your favorite older rock song, it was that vital, yet unmemorable section that occurs two-thirds through a song and provides a new harmonic progression and momentum towards the final chorus. According to the section’s defining features in traditional rock genres, it has been seemingly transformed in recent popular music. In this talk I will demonstrate how the duty of formal contrast in post-millennial pop has shifted from primary parameters (like harmony) to secondary parameters (timbre, texture, and dynamics) (Meyer 1989). Thus, a bridge primarily exists due to contrast in these (secondary) parameters throughout the song form. First, I will discuss characteristics of post-millennial popular music and how it aligns with and differs from paradigms of earlier rock and pop. After a brief tour of bridges near the end of the 20th century, I will show the shifted priorities in recent popular music, demonstrating how the sections contain contrast in other domains beyond harmony and melody. I then unpack specific roles and functions that bridge sections play in this newer repertoire. With these examples in mind, I close with a discussion of the idea of “telos” in popular music form, and how it relates to the construction and expression within the bridge section.

The Speaker: 

William Robin is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Maryland’s School of Music. His research explores how institutions structure the creation, dissemination, and reception of contemporary classical music in the United States. His first book, Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace, will be published on Feb. 22 with Oxford University Press, and examines the new-music festival Bang on a Can and their participation in major institutional shifts in contemporary music in the 1980s and 1990s. Recent publications include an exploration of the term “indie classical” in the Journal of the Society for American Music, an article on new music and neoliberalism in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and an examination of patronage and politics at the New York Philharmonic’s 1983 Horizons festival in Musical Quarterly. As a public musicologist, Robin contributes to The New York Times and The New Yorker, received an ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award in 2014, and tweets avidly as @seatedovation. He also hosts the podcast Sound Expertise, whose second season will launch in March 2021.

Paper Abstract: 

“The Bang on a Can Festival, the 8-year-old irreverent New York forum for new music, is invading the mainstream,” wrote Billboard in May 1995. The magazine was pointing out a major moment in the festival’s history: that season, what had begun as a quirky, do-it-yourself marathon of contemporary music in downtown New York was now playing a run of concerts at Lincoln Center and releasing an album on the major label Sony Classical. Bang on a Can’s remarkable growth in the early 1990s—as it expanded with an in-house ensemble and collaborations with major classical music organizations, its budget grew by more than twentyfold––can be traced to the entrepreneurial ingenuity of its three founding composers. But it was also a result of significant structural shifts: a “marketplace turn” in American new music in the late twentieth century, in which institutions and musicians came to believe that the survival of contemporary composition depended on reaching a broad, non-specialist audience. A reversal of Cold War-era attitudes, the marketplace turn profoundly reshaped the institutional landscape for the American avant-garde: the granting organization Meet the Composer facilitated contact between composers and the public; government funders like the New York State Council on the Arts encouraged grantees to focus on audience outreach; presenters like Lincoln Center saw contemporary music as a means to attract new ticket buyers; and the record industry looked to new music as an opportunity to amass profits. In this talk, I trace Bang on a Can’s expansion in this period, as it traipsed through these developments and found new ways to grow the listenership for contemporary composition.

The Speaker: 

Chelsea Burns (UT Austin).

Paper Abstract: 

In 1940, composer Carlos Chávez organized concerts for New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) with the title “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Music.” These concerts, designed to pair with the exhibit “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art” in the same space, provided an event that would seem to be paradigmatically nationalistic in nature: art and music from Mexico’s present and past, celebrated in the United States’s major cultural center with fanfare, national attention, and enthusiastic support from the Mexican government. However, the frame of nationalism belies the economic, political, and military realities of 1940, providing instead a seemingly celebratory approach to musical identity based upon a facile connection between composer and place.For music analysis, a nationalistic frame has dominated close readings of works by Chávez and his Latin American contemporaries. This frame misses critical musical features, focusing on touchpoints of vernacular or supposedly Amerindian elements while ignoring practical pressures—in this case, pressure on Chávez to present a stereotypical Mexican identity for consumption by bourgeois New Yorkers, a kind of musical tourism. In this talk, I take Chávez’s MoMA concerts as a case study to show how nationalism as a frame can inhibit understanding of music’s many possible meanings. I advocate for an alternative analytical approach, one that centers more specific contextual and material grounding. In so doing, I find that it is possible to understand these works in ways that are contradictory to those provided by a nationalistic frame. Further, I argue that this frame is not only imprecise and insufficient, but urgently in need of change if music theorists wish to address issues of inclusion and tokenistic diversity.

 The Speaker: 

Edward Klorman (McGill University).

Paper Abstract: 

This paper examines historical writings about the “Classical” string quartet, a genre often compared to social intercourse. Such metaphors implicitly interpret each part (or player) as representing distinct characters. This concept of multiple personas contrasts sharply with the more monological musical personifications advanced in many recent writings on musical agency, such as Cone’s influential The Composer’s Voice, which posit a “central intelligence” representing the “mind” of the composition, its fictional protagonist, or its composer.

Focusing principally on discussions of Mozart’s quartets in Koch’s Versuch (1793) and Momigny’s Cours complet (1806), I examine whether instrumental personas postulated by each author constitute genuine agents, according to Monahan’s (2013) criteria. At issue is whether personas are described as possessing (1) such anthropomorphic qualities as sentience, volition, and emotion, and (2) a capacity for independent action or utterance.

Koch describes the quartet as comprising four main parts (Hauptstimmen) that constantly exchange melodic, bass, and accompanimental roles, an arrangement that he contrasts with other genres in which a single instrument claims the ancestral privilege of being the main melody (Vorrecht der Hauptmelodie). Koch explicitly equates the concept of Hauptstimme with personhood, stating that a polyphonic piece (comprising multiple Hauptstimmen) represents the sentiments of many individual people, unlike a homophonic piece, whose lone Hauptstimme represents one individual. He describes the characters’ intercourse as being motivated by rivalry (Wettstreit), echoing a competitive principle described in many contemporaneous conversation manuals (Burke 1993).Momigny’s analysis of Mozart’s K. 421 famously recasts it as an aria for Dido (first violin), with a minor part for Aeneas (fleetingly represented by the cello). Although Momigny’s score—which assigns verse almost exclusively to the first violin—would seem to relegate the others to subordinate status, his prose reveals a more nuanced understanding, particularly in passages involving contrapuntal imitation, which prompt a protoagential interpretation.

Paper Title: 

“Harmonic Schemata and Hypermeter.”

Paper Title: 

“‘A Little Gold-Digger at the Start’? Beverly Sills as Elizabeth ‘Baby Doe’ Tabor.”

Paper Title: 

“Cabaret Songs as Discord to the Harmonizing Narrative of Theresienstadt.”

Paper Title: 

“Country Mexicans: Sounding Mexican American Life, Love, and Belonging in Country Music.”

Paper Title: 

“Cavalry Kettledrummers, Trumpeters and Mounted Bands: Rome, the Crusades, Europe, and the Americas.”

Paper Title:

“Détournement and the Moving Image: The Politics of Representation in Early Punk Videos.”

Paper Title: 

“Hip Hop Diplomacy as Subversive Complicity.”

Paper Title: 

“Between Rationalism and Empiricism: (Mis)Reading Mattheson Reading Descartes.”

Paper Title: 

“Hip-Hop as an Educational Tool: Why Hip Hop Education is Imperative to Teachers and Students.”

Paper Title: 

“Audible and Inaudible Features of Music.”

The Speaker:

Aaron S. Allen is director of the Environmental and Sustainability Studies Program and Associate Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he also served as the institution’s first Academic Sustainability Coordinator. A fellow of the American Academy in Rome, he earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2006 with a dissertation on the nineteenth-century Italian reception of Beethoven. His B.A. in music and B.S. in environmental studies are from Tulane University. Aaron has published on campus sustainability, Beethoven reception, and ecomusicology. He is co-editor with Kevin Dawe of the collection Current Directions in Ecomusicology (Routledge 2016).

Paper Abstract: 

“Musical Trees.” Fundamental to the sound of Western art music, the violin family forms the backbone of most ensembles from chamber to stage. Professional violins depend on at least two endemic natural resources: Italian spruce for the soundboards, and Brazilian pernambuco for the bows. The highest quality bows are made of only wild-grown pernambuco (pau brasil) from Brazil’s Atlantic Coastal Forest. Pau brasil was so important that European colonial powers warred over it with each other and with indigenous peoples; eventually, the country Brazil was named after the wood. Today, the tree is nearly extinct: 8% of the original forest is extant, and only 5% of pernambuco habitat remains. But Italian red spruce has fared better in the unusual Alpine microclimate of the Val di Fiemme’s Paneveggio Forest. The species is widely distributed, but Paneveggian spruce makes excellent resonance wood for soundboards, which has contributed to the renown of this “forest of violins.” Despite various threats during the past millennium, Fiemmesi traditions have preserved the forest; today, more trees grow than loggers harvest, and musicians regularly make pilgrimages to their sacred groves in the Paneveggio. The values accorded to musical traditions and the instruments necessary for them can reverberate through individual tree species to particular forests. Western art music, an endangered (if elite) tradition that might need preservation, contributes both to threatening and to protecting the unique resources on which it depends. In other words, our aesthetic choices have ethical ramifications that impact the world in negative and positive ways.

Paper Title: 

“Present at the Creation: The Romantic Iconography of the Turned Canvas."

Paper Title: 

“In the Margins”

Paper Title: 

“‘Show You The Music?’: Trusting the Mute and Questioning Ableism in Film Music Theory.”

Presentation Title:

“A Tale of Two Voxmans.” (MLA conference presentation)

Paper Title:

“Desecularizing Beethoven: Is Beethoven a Sacred Composer?”

Paper Title: 

“Performing Celebrity: Opera Theater, Audiences, and the Late Eighteenth-Century Prima Donna”

Paper Title:

“‘Hearing Organic Structure’: Viktor Zuckerkandl as Schenker’s Disciple.”

Paper Title: 

“Bayesian Learning of Tonal Cadences.”

Paper Title: 

“Music and the 100th Anniversary of America’s Entrance into World War I.”

Paper Title: 

“Paths and Asides in Galant Expositions.”

Paper Title: 

“Marian Anderson and the Desegregation of the American Concert Stage.”

Paper Title: 

“Arts Policy and Musical Diplomacy in the Obama Era: An Ethnomusicologist and Arts Administrator’s Perspective.”

Paper Title: 

"Learning To Read."