UW-Madison School of Music Colloquium Series

September 17, 2010: Vocal Ornamentation and Its Many Meanings

2011-01-15T13:53:00.000-08:00

Guest Speaker

Cindy Kim
PhD Candidate in Musicology
Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester

Location: Humanities 1641

Performance practice scholars have long argued that vocal ornamentation continued as a vital part of Italian opera performance throughout the nineteenth century; yet, modern histories of opera have often dismissed this vibrant tradition, focusing on compositional style as the sole parameter for charting the development of the genre during this period. This approach has resulted in inconsistencies between the histories of performance practice and of compositions, and a misunderstanding of vocal embellishment as an outdated convention, serving only the singer’s propensity for virtuosic display.

In this paper, I argue for a reconsideration of ornamentation and its place in nineteenth-century opera composition, reception, and concert life. Taking Vincenzo Bellini’s La sonnambula (1831) and the embellishments for the heroine Amina as a case study, I claim that singers’ ornamentation could steer the dramatic trajectory of a character, the meaning of an opera, and even the direction of future compositions. As the case study will show, charting the influence of this unwritten tradition on written musical works sheds new light not only on ornamentation but also on opera, a genre characterized by its fluidity from one performance to another.

October 1, 2010: Jewish Music, Handel, and the Berlin Jewish Culture League

2011-01-14T13:40:00.000-08:00

Guest Speaker

Lily E. Hirsch
Assistant Professor of Music History

Cleveland State University

Location: Humanities 1641

The Berlin Jüdischer Kulturbund, or Jewish Culture League, was a closed cultural organization created by German Jewish luminaries in cooperation with the Nazi government. This presentation examines the organization's debate on "Jewish music" and its culmination, represented by the Jewish Culture League Conference in 1936. To further access this debate in practice, the presentation specifically focuses on Handel's popularity in League performance. However, Handel's standing in the League's repertoire may further confound, rather than clarify, this inquiry. After all, Handel, of German origins, was quite popular in the League in part because of his music considered Jewish. Despite or maybe because of contradictions like this one, this paper is able to shed light on the complicated process of defining "Jewish music" in Nazi Germany. It also offers a glimpse into the internal operation of this unique organization, a product of collaboration between Jews and Nazis, and, for many, a place of both salvation and damnation.

October 15, 2010: "Pure Radio" versus "Photography in Sound:" Experimenting with Radio's Potential in the late 1930s

2011-01-13T13:08:00.000-08:00

UW-Madison Faculty

Michele Hilmes (profile)
Professor of Communication Arts

Location: Humanities 1641

The debate over radio's capacity to create its own unique universe of expression, on the one hand, versus its ability to capture and transmit reality, on the other, goes back as far as its very first theorist, Rudolph Arnheim. In the United States and Great Britain, techniques of live studio production had risen to a height by the late 1930s, using music, voice, and sound effects to create a kind of program celebrated as "pure radio," inimitable by any other medium. Yet a counterforce, linked to slowly developing technologies of recording, sought to capture the voices and songs of working class people in an atmosphere of democracy in crisis. Add a transatlantic element — many of these experiments involved both British and American producers, working in tandem — and the scene was set for a short-lived period of unique experiments in sound that involved writers, composers, and musicians such as Arthur Miller, Archibald MacLeish, Norman Corwin, Benjamin Britten, Bernard Herrmann, Alan Lomax, and Dylan Thomas, as well as newsmen and documentarists such as John Grierson, Pare Lorentz, and Edward R. Murrow.

October 29, 2010: SEM/AMS Conference Preview

2011-01-12T13:32:00.000-08:00

UW-Madison Faculty
Pamela Potter (profile)
Professor of Musicology

UW-Madison Students

Rachel Goc

MA Student in Ethnomusicology

November 19, 2010: The Mise-en-scene of Mediation: Wagner's Götterdämmerung (Stuttgart Opera, Peter Konwitschny, 2002-2003)

2011-01-11T13:44:00.000-08:00

Guest Speaker

David Levin
Associate Professor of Germanic Studies

University of Chicago

Location: 2650 Humanities

This talk examines the stakes of theatricality in Peter Konwitschny's strikingly unconventional production of Wagner's Götterdämmerung, which concluded the Stuttgart Opera's strikingly unconventional centennial production of the Ring cycle. The Konwitschny production sets out from a scene that is jarringly, jaw-droppingly anachronistic, and it concludes with an equally surprising, but much more familiar account of scenic erasure. As it turns out, opera and theatricality prove especially helpful in making sense of Konwitschny's production, which maps the tragedy of Wagner's tetralogy onto a scenic landscape beyond opera.

March 5, 2010:“Wohin?”: Transcribing Poetry into Performance

2010-05-26T16:28:00.000-07:00

Guest Speaker
Daniel Barolsky (profile)
Assistant Professor of Music
Beloit College, WI

Location: Humanities 1641

Transcriptions are usually classified in the liminal space between composition on one hand and performance on the other. Scholars have made attempts to define the term further, distinguishing it from an arrangement, paraphrase, or variation. Ferruccio Busoni, in an essay from 1910, resists both the categorization of creative musical processes and the hierarchies inherent within these divisions. In a radical claim, one largely ignored, Busoni argues that we include both composition and performance within the definition of transcriptions.

In this paper I will present an analysis of Wilhelm Müller’s poem, “Wohin?” as set by Schubert, transcribed by Liszt and Rachmaninoff, and performed by Rachmaninoff and Ruth Laredo. I argue that we consider the shared developmental and analytic processes among composition, transcription, and performance to better evaluate the conceptual aesthetic of the transcriber, whether she be transcriber, composer, or performer.

March 12, 2010:Listening to "The Burrow": Kafka and Acousmatic Sound

2010-05-25T16:00:00.000-07:00

University Lectures
Guest Speaker
Brian Kane (profile)
Assistant Professor of Music Theory
Yale University

Location: Humanities 2650

Acousmatic sound—a sound that one hears without seeing the causes behind it—is often associated with the work of Pierre Schaeffer and the tradition of musique concrète. Although no treatment of acousmatic sound can neglect Schaeffer's theory, the history of acousmatic sound predates Schaeffer. A close study of literary sources can help supplement a theory of acousmatic sound, for numerous writers have addressed the psychological and cultural implications of acousmatic sound, without ever using the term. Franz Kafka, like other writers of the early 20th century, is useful for articulating the new conditions of aurality that directly impacted the development of acousmatic sound. In fact, Kafka presents one of the finest analyses of acousmatic sound in his late tale, “The Burrow.” In this tale, the protagonist, a mole, suddenly hears a high-pitched whistle in his burrow. An endless series of hypotheses are tested but the mole, unable to locate its source or cause, grows more and more anxious. By comparing Kafka's treatment of acousmatic sound against Schaeffer's concrète works, I will develop a theory of acousmatic listening based on the premise that sonic effects necessarily underdetermine attributions of source and cause. Underdetermination encourages anxiety and uncertainty, and marks acousmatic listening as site of tense unsettledness. In addition, by following Kafka’s high-pitched whistle into related contexts—such as tinnitus, auditory hallucinations, and deaf composers—where subjectively produced sounds take on an uncanny objectivity and persistence, I demonstrate that acousmatic listening is often culturally deployed when the secure differentiation of subject and object is compromised.

April 9, 2010:Identifying and Describing Pitch Structure in Post-Tonal Pitch Centric Music

2010-05-24T16:30:00.000-07:00

Guest Speaker
Stan Kleppinger (profile)
Assistant Professor of Music Theory
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Location: Humanities 1641

A great deal of music written since the twilight of the tonal era projects into prominence a single pitch class above the others without attending to the other principles of harmonic progression and voice-leading typically associated with traditional tonality. Such music invites analysis that places pitch centers at the heart of a perspective of the music’s structure. But an appropriate analytical framework has proven difficult to come by. We have the intuition that at least some of this music has a sense of large-scale tonal coherence, but lack the means to articulate it.

This paper proposes an analytical model that begins by focusing upon the pitch classes and other pitch events that figure most prominently in aural perception of this repertoire. This gives rise to speculation about connections between these pitch elements and other aspects of the work. Investigation of these potential correlations may confirm their existence and significance or may lead to revision of the speculative ideas about such correlations. A perspective of the tonal principles (or tonal ambiguity) governing the music eventually emerges from this process.

Conditions of salience (adapted from Fred Lerdahl) and of “tonal residue” (evocation of tonic defining techniques from the tonal era) provide criteria by which we can describe how particular pitch classes are made prominent. Taking cues from David Epstein, I follow this exploration of perceptual criteria with a frank assessment of the roles of subjectivity and ambiguity in the perceptual and speculative aspects of this method. To demonstrate this approach, and its limits, I provide analyses of works by Ligeti, Carter, and Copland.

April 23, 2010:Designing Destinies: Carl Seashore’s World of Music, Education, and Eugenics

2010-05-23T19:13:00.000-07:00

UW-Madison Faculty
Julia Eklund Koza (profile)
Professor of Music Education

Location: Humanities 1641

Psychologist Carl Seashore (1866-1949) is probably best remembered in music circles as a titanic founding father of music education research and as the creator of the first musical aptitude tests. However, he made contributions in a wide range of other fields, as well, including ethnomusicology and higher education administration. What is not widely known is that he was deeply involved in the American eugenics movement. This colloquium will focus on how Seashore’s classed, raced, and gendered eugenical views infused and informed his work in music, education, and music education.

February 19, 2010:The Word and the Sixteenth-Century Motet

2010-02-19T16:00:00.000-08:00

UW-Madison Faculty
David Crook (profile)
Professor of Musicology

Location: Humanities 1641

What was the function of the sixteenth-century motet? When and where was it used, and what did its performance mean to those who heard it? We know the genre provided pious entertainment during, for example, meals and siestas, and both Catholics and Lutherans performed it within the context of their respective liturgies. But what made a particular motet appropriate to a particular day or occasion? About this, music historians have had surprisingly little to say beyond the general assumption that the liturgical associations of a motet’s text provide a guide. In an influential study of motet performances recorded in the Sistine Chapel diaries, for example, Anthony Cummings reported that, “for the most part, the texts of the motets clearly pertain to the liturgy of the feast on which they were performed.” He acknowledged, however, that some “atypical” motets set texts that were unrelated, or only marginally related, to the day’s liturgy. My study of published motet collections ordered according to the church year shows, however, that the liturgical assignment of the motet’s own text was incidental not causal: what mattered was the motet text’s ability to gloss—sometimes in unexpected and fanciful ways—the Gospel and Epistle readings of the day. This new view of the motet as a form of biblical exegesis not only resolves Cummings’s anomalies, it provides a new understanding of the relationship between motet performance, the mystery of the Incarnation, and the value contemporary reformers ascribed to the aural experience of the Word.

February 5, 2010:The Context and Song Texts of North Indian Art Music

2010-02-05T16:00:00.000-08:00

UW-Madison Faculty
Lalita du Perron (profile)
Associate Director, Center for South Asia

Location: Humanities 1641

The vocal genres khyal and thumri in North Indian Art (Hindustani) music are, on the modern stage, almost always performed by middle-class performers. Although in some strata of society being a professional performer is not considered an appropriate career for women, the stigma attached to being a woman on stage is slowly decreasing. Most modern audiences are unaware of the colourful history of the genres they patronise, a history firmly rooted in courtly and courtesan milieus.

In this presentation we will look at some modern video footage of traditional performers, and analyse how the texts of the songs they sing have been altered through the ages to fit in with the respectable image that Hindustani music has in the modern era.

December 4, 2009:Who are You Calling an Oxymoron? Contesting the Unnaming of a Black Avant-Garde

2009-12-04T16:00:00.000-08:00

Guest Speaker
Scott Currie (profile)
Musicology/Ethnomusicology Lecturer
University of Minnesota

Location: Humanities 1641

Reports of the jazz avant-garde’s death have been greatly exaggerated, and calls for its interment rather premature, as over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork with a contemporary community of improvising musicians on New York City’s Lower East Side has led me to conclude. Indeed, my research indicates, rear-guard denunciations of what jazz neo-conservatives term the “so-called avant-garde,” along with high-handed dismissals from institutionally validated “serious-music” vanguardists, reveal in their attempts at effacement and exclusion a profound anxiety engendered by the survival (against all odds) of a movement that has challenged fundamental premises of the racially marked jazz and concert-music worlds. In exploring the discourses surrounding, if not always successfully containing, this black avant-garde, I thus engage what Fred Moten has identified as the defining paradox of such movements: the manner in which they appear to exist “oxymoronically—as if black, on the one hand, and avant-garde, on the other hand, each depends for its coherence upon the exclusion of the other.” Through an analysis of the aporias from which this conundrum arises, I ultimately find that the unique vantage point jazz provides upon the avant-garde not only makes possible a critical reappraisal of established theories of the phenomenon—such as those of Poggioli, Bürger, and Enzensberger—but also helps cast light upon the racial lacunae of Euro-American modernism and postmodernism.

November 6, 2009: The Dynamics of Identity in Fin-de-Siècle French Music

2009-11-06T16:00:00.000-08:00

University Lectures
Guest Speaker
Jann Pasler (profile)
Professor of Music
University of California, San Diego

Location: Morphy Hall, Humanities 2330

As the French increasingly looked to the origin of their nation for the foundation of what they shared as a people—racial and cultural origins that long predated the eighteenth century—music helped them come to grips with a history characterized not by homogeneous coherence, but by invasions, conflict, and accommodation. Were they only the product of assimilation, their music the “juste milieu” between Italian and German music, or was there something distinct that could be heard in their music, traces of predecessors who resisted assimilation? If gender differences and female allegories continued to help clarify what the people valued as a nation, what happened in music when successful resistance to the French in West Africa, particularly by the Dahomean amazons, and the emergence of the “new woman” threw into question traditional gender hierarchies? And what impact did elites’ need for distinction from the masses have on their musical tastes, their relationship to music, and the meanings they heard in it? Such questions lead us to examine how, through their music, the French, particularly at the end of the century, engaged with identity from the perspectives of race, gender, and class.

October 30, 2009: SEM/AMS Conference Preview

2009-10-30T16:00:00.000-07:00

UW-Madison Students

Location: Humanities 1641

Chris Barry, Music Theory Ph.D. candidate
Preview of a paper to be presented at the American Musicological Society 2009 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia

~Unrecording Philomel: Taped Voice as Schizophrenic Prosthesis~

The sound world of Milton Babbitt's Philomel (1964) consists of a live soprano, the soprano's taped and electronically manipulated voice, and a pitched synthesizer accompaniment. Interpreting Philomel through the lens of schizophonica - a weakening of the perception of sonic reality and a state particularly appropriate to the reception of electronic and recorded sound - reveals Philomel as engaging in a mythic, temporally pliant rehabilitation of voice in which she transforms, radiophonically, from silent receiver to sounding transmitter. The taped voice is simultaneously a symptom of Philomel's trauma-induced schizophrenia and a technological prosthesis for her muted tongue, modeling processes of vocal and syntactical definition for the live voice; the live voice, in turn, "unrecords" the tape as it additively redefines itself, tampering with the notions of temporality in the electronic reproduction of sound.

Scott Carter, Ethnomusicology Ph.D. candidate
Preview of a paper to be presented at the Society for Ethnomusicology 2009 Annual Meeting in Mexico City

~Science, Race, and the Singing Body: Voice Culture in the Nineteenth Century~

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, vocal pedagogues increasingly utilized scientific literature on vocal anatomy in their pursuit of empirically-oriented methods for the training of the Western singing voice. These writers referred to their work as "voice culture," a system of voice cultivation that included detailed analysis of vocal physiology and thorough instructions for controlling, exercising, and coordinating the voice's anatomical components. Drawing freely from the knowledge produced by physical anthropology and evolutionary science, voice culture authors argued that the Western singing voice sounded the pinnacle of human biological and cultural development. By exploring these texts and the scientific literature upon which they are based, we can begin to understand how Western singing became the performative consequence of practices steeped in notions of cultural, social, and physiological difference and rendered audible embodied ideologies of race and civilization.

October 16, 2009: Unigenitus and les Filles de l'Opéra

2009-10-16T16:00:00.000-07:00

UW-Madison Faculty
Charles Dill (profile)
Professor of Musicology

Location: Humanities 1641

In 1879, Adolphe Jullien published an essay entitled “L’Eglise et l’Opéra en 1735. Mlle. Lemaure et l’Evêque de Saint-Papoul.” Jullien’s interest in the singer Catherine-Nicole Lemaure and the bishop of Saint-Papoul Jean-Charles de Segur, was largely anecdotal, laying out an instance in which public interest focused on the behavior of an opera singer. The 1730s were a period in which the Parisian public took particular interest in opera and its singers, in which five of Rameau’s major works premiered, and discussion of the social importance of opera was nearly constant, reaching from reflections in aesthetics treatises to the pages of official journals and on to street songs sung on Pont Neuf. In this context, the so-called filles de l’Opéra, and Lemaure in particular, received more than their share of attention.

My own interest is drawn to the odd pairing, in Jullien’s story, of the Opéra with ongoing controversies surrounding the acceptance of the anti-Jansenist papal bull, Unigenitus, represented by Segur's resignation. In the past two decades, since first reading Jullien’s essay, I have found numerous iterations of this pairing, which extends from the Janesenist condemnations of theatrical entertainment in the 1670s to pamphlets associated with the querelle des bouffons in the 1750s. More than an isolated matter arising in 1735, then, the pairing of an austere form of Catholicism with one of the principal forms of entertainment was a theme that drew public interest for about seventy years. It was a comparison, a joke perhaps, an expression of some kind that we no longer understand. What I hope to do in the present study is examine two documents from Jullien’s story to reveal a bit what this pairing implied and to understand better contemporary social anxieties over opera. It is my contention that the documents tell us something about how the public viewed opera.

September 25, 2009:Anton Webern Meets Philippe de Vitry: Thoughts on Reception History

2009-09-25T16:00:00.001-07:00

UW-Madison Faculty
Lawrence Earp (profile)
Professor of Musicology

NEW LOCATION: Humanities 1641

'I am moved to speak of forms changed into new bodies...'
A recent article on a late Webern cantata movement explores aesthetic issues of serial music theorized in the early 1950s by Boulez, and, in a literary analogy, by Barthes. These same years saw Boulez's sympathetic reception of another music dependent on pre-compositional structuring, the isorhythmic motet of the early 1300s. In fact, this was the first era in which these works found a receptive ear in modern times. My paper muses over the ramifications of a kind of reception history in reverse, as I try to discover what "expression" means in this dead medieval repertory.