A Portrait of Musical Cubism: Ferruccio Busoni and the Sonatina Seconda<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Erinn E. Knyt (University of Massachusetts Amherst)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1917, a reviewer for the Musical Courier<\/em> described Ferruccio Busoni\u2019s music as \u201ccubist.\u201d Although the reviewer might have been using the term \u201ccubist\u201d in a descriptive sense, deeper analysis reveals direct connections to cubist painting techniques. Busoni composed the Sonatina seconda <\/em>during the summer of 1912, just a few months after attending the Futurist painting exhibition in London. In addition, Busoni met with Paul Klee in 1911, and he owned a copy of Der Blaue Reiter Almanach<\/em>, which was published in 1912. Busoni declared the importance of the text for his artistic and aesthetic ideals in a brief essay about the publication, stating: \u201cDer Blaue Reiter<\/em>, a recent publication about new art, brings the reader page by page a publication that is a manifesto in notes.\u201d Although Busoni did not use the term cubist in reference to his own work, he did describe a compositional process that was deeply inspired by art, literature, architecture, and the world as he experienced it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Through analysis of letters, photographs, and other documents, this essay documents Busoni\u2019s knowledge of visual art, and draws connections between visual artistic techniques and Busoni\u2019s compositional approach in the Sonatina seconda<\/em>. It also discusses specific paintings that he collected and friendships that he maintained with visual artists, such as Umberto Boccioni and Paul Klee. In doing so, it connects this knowledge to Busoni\u2019s unique musical structures and polystylistic, multi-dimensional compositional approach that synthesizes harmonic movement in time with segmented planes of timbral color and textural shapes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Although cross influences between music and visual art in the early twentieth century were common, some of the connections, including Busoni\u2019s remain underexplored. In examining Busoni\u2019s music in relation to visual art that informed it, this essay adds to recent scholarship examining the multi-stranded and multi-disciplinary threads underpinning the development of modernity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ** ** ** ** **<\/p>\n\n\n\n Heinrich\u2019s America(s): Anthony Philip Heinrich\u2019s Dawning of Music\u00a0in Kentucky<\/em> and the\u00a0Early American Musical Landscape<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Virginia Jansen (Boston University)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the preface of his first collection, The Dawning of Music in Kentucky, or The Pleasures of Harmony in the Solitudes of Nature<\/em>, published in 1820, Anthony Philip Heinrichwrote that \u201cthe many and severe animadversions, so long and repeatedly cast on the talent forMusic in this Country, has been one of the chief motives of the Author, in the exercise of hisabilities; and should he be able, by this effort, to create but one single Star in the West, no onewould ever be more proud than himself, to be called an American Musician.\u201d With thisstatement, Heinrich asserted himself as a \u201cStar,\u201d but explicitly \u201cin the West\u201d and connected hispersonal strivings for fame and success to a larger quest for an American art music. Hecontended that he had \u201cbeen thrown\u2026far from the emporiums of musical science, into theisolated wilds of nature, where he invoked his Muse, tutored only by Alma Mater.\u201d This claimworked against his support of American art music, as he denied any influences beyond that ofMother Earth, but it did feed into his personal brand as a pioneer of American music. Despite hisimplications otherwise, Heinrich\u2019s Dawning<\/em> bears a multitude of American influences, both from ideas of American culture and history and from the nascent musical landscape. By examining the titles, forms, instrumentations, musical quotations, and lyrics of pieces in Dawning<\/em>, both the influenced and innovative elements of the collection can be unearthed. This study of Dawning<\/em> illustrates a specific and pivotal moment in early American art music but also examines Heinrich\u2019s manipulations of that moment for his personal narrative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ** ** ** ** **<\/p>\n\n\n\n Performing the Sacred Feminine: Suor Cecilia Macca\u2019s Settings of the Salve Regina<\/em> and the Stabat Mater<\/em> in Nineteenth Century Noto, Sicily<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Jeana Melilli (University of Florida)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Celebrated Italian musical settings of Marian hymns are, paradoxically, masculine representations of the sacred feminine with few examples from women composers. How does the meaning of the poetry change if is composed and performed by women who know the suffering, hope, and mercy that male composers only imagined? Among the twenty extant works of the Sicilian Benedictine nun, Cecilia Macca (c. 1788-1841), are eight settings of the Salve Regina<\/em> and a shortened Stabat Mater<\/em> for the nuns of her church, Santa Chiara in the small town of Noto. In this paper, I will situate these compositions within the concept of feminine performativity, as defined in Simone de Beauvoir and rearticulated in Julia Kristeva. Additionally, I will explore the reversal of gender roles within the construction of these unexplored works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Macca adopted a dramatic, operatic style which increased the effect of women\u2019s voices rising heavenward. Instead of chromatic weeping motifs, Macca presents musical visions of joy, emphasizing \u201cour sweetness and our hope\u201d rather than dramatizing the \u201cbanished children of Eve.\u201d She also highlights Mary\u2019s strength as she suffers at the cross in the opening of the Stabat Mater<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My work expands on the scholarship of Robert Kendrick, Helen Hills, Laurie Stras, and Angela Fiore, who posit convents as powerful and popular performance space. Santa Chiara is located on the main piazza, and, with its unusual oval shape, evokes the sacred feminine image of the egg. As the nuns sang behind a grate, above and out of the view of the congregation, I argue that they created an audible metaphor of the Assumption of Mary, to whom the church was also dedicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ** ** ** ** **<\/p>\n\n\n\n What happened to M\u00e8re Marie?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Zac Stewart (Yale University)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Occurring as they do just before the celebrated denouement of Francis Poulenc\u2019s 1957 opera Dialogues des Carm\u00e9lites<\/em>, in which sixteen nuns mount the steps to a guillotine, the last words of the character M\u00e8re Marie appear inconspicuous. \u201cI am dishonored!\u201d she cries, realizing that she will not join the other Carmelites in martyrdom. \u201cTheir last glances will search for me in vain.\u201d If the other Carmelites\u2019 executions pose the question of what meaning can be attributed to apparently senseless deaths, M\u00e8re Marie\u2019s despair poses the question of how to imbue an apparently arbitrary continuation of life with meaning. Poulenc and Georges Bernanos, who wrote the opera\u2019s text, do not indicate what happens to M\u00e8re Marie afterwards, but I take her undefined end as itself significant, as itself indicative of the challenges of continuing to live after others have died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this paper I expand on M\u00e8re Marie\u2019s last, anguished lines to explore her position as a survivor and witness, a complex and freighted category of person in post-Second World War France. Her suffering suggests the experiences of survivors: traumatic recollections, inner compulsions to bear witness, and feelings of guilt for having survived. The act of bearing witness was understood in the postwar as a moral imperative, and has more recently been theorized as a means of retrospectively dismantling or subverting the conditions that pertained in the Nazi camps. I argue that Dialogues des Carm\u00e9lites<\/em> offered precisely such a morally charged opportunity to its original audiences, and reflect on the particular role of music as a privileged means of ritualized witnessing. I conclude by turning briefly to the San Francisco production of the opera in 1957, and considering how it thematizes the opera\u2019s concern with absences and emphasizes the contemporaneous character of M\u00e8re Marie\u2019s experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ** ** ** ** **<\/p>\n\n\n\n The \u201cSense\u201d of Mendelssohn\u2019s Violin Concerto, op. 64<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Robert Whitehouse Eshbach (University of New Hampshire)<\/p>\n\n\n\n How does a work become canonical?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Joseph Kerman famously wrote, \u201crepertories are determined by performers, canons by critics\u201d (1983). As Kerman elaborated it, this statement is true by definition \u2014 yet this commingling of two somewhat specious dichotomies seems cramped. Works have creators (often multiple), and they have audiences who individually and collectively hear and use them according to their own understanding and for their own purposes. As Howard S. Becker pointed out, artworks also have external support systems that are invested in promoting them and \u201cspinning\u201d their meanings (2008). In a very real sense, then, it \u201ctakes a village\u201d to produce a significant work of art; the contributions to an artwork\u2019s viability, not just of performers and critics, but also of many other stakeholders are inseparably imbricated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Repertories \u2014 and canons \u2014 are constantly in flux. The career of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy should, above all others, serve as an object lesson in how the reception of a composer\u2019s works can vary with time, place, circumstance, and ideology, often for reasons unrelated to the work itself. In our time, the very notion of a reified canon \u2014 a body of \u201ctimeless\u201d or \u201cuniversal\u201d \u201cmasterpieces\u201d \u2014 has become problematic. The issue of inclusion, of determining whose voices are heard and how they are valued, continually calls into question received means and standards of judgement. It is worthwhile, therefore, to investigate more broadly the ways in which works enter and hold their place in public discourse \u2014 how they become valuable, and even indispensable to us. Using original research, this paper will examine the often-surprising early career of Mendelssohn\u2019s Violin Concerto, op. 64 in Europe and America, on its way to becoming the canonic work that it is today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ** ** ** ** **<\/p>\n\n\n\n Grieg in Context:<\/em> A Critical Comparison of Four Recorded Performances<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n James Thomas (Dalhousie University)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Edvard Grieg missed the first recording of his Piano Concerto in A minor by a year. Not a stranger to early recording technologies, Grieg had already preserved some of his own playing on Edison cylinders, but died just in time to miss the first attempt to capture his first and only concerto in sonic form for the very first time in 1909. Comparing modern performances of Grieg\u2019s piano concerto to Wilhelm Backhaus\u2019 1909 recording demonstrates just how significantly a century of stylistic and technological advancements can change a written work beyond its score, and how very different these historical recordings were from the monumental recordings of modern performers. Concerti pose a unique challenge to recording technologies, and push the boundaries of what those technologies can and cannot do. Recording a concerto requires the ability to simultaneously capture the nuances of a soloist and the massive sound of an orchestra. They are long, multi-movement works that demand stamina to perform, and sometimes to listen to. The historical association between concerti and \u201cliveness\u201d complicates its relationship to recording, due to the immense production scale and challenging performance aspect.\u00a0 These challenges pose interesting questions from the perspective of the performer, the producer, and the audience. In this essay, I will analyze four separate performances over a hundred-year period to demonstrate what historical recordings can tell us about the way music was produced and performed over the last century, and how recording technology impacted the evolution of practice in that time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ** ** ** ** **<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSing with You\u201d:<\/strong> Sonic Activism and the Echoes of New Values in Hong Kong\u2019s Shopping Malls<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Winnie W.C. Lai (University of Pennsylvania)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Batons, pepper spray, blood-stained floors, broken umbrellas, frightened screams, shopping bags, a bellow of rage, injured people, slogans, moving escalators, and the mundane shopping mall music. All these appeared on the evening of July 15, 2019, in New Town Plaza, a luxury mall in the suburban district of Shatin in Hong Kong. This surreal scene of violent police siege and protest inside the materialist glitz of the mall has wholly transformed the relations between the city\u2019s neoliberal mall system and local beings. Since that day, Hongkongers have protested in malls with their sounding bodies with new consumption practices, complicating and politicizing the entanglements of mall spaces through slogan-chatting and singing, giving new meanings to the protests and the quotidian urban experience they have had. In everyday living, the public has a relatively passive role in shopping malls as mall dwellers are situated in the consumer society where the loop of laboring, commodity circulations, and the increasingly \u201cSino-sized\u201d capitalism often manipulate people\u2019s way of living. How do Hongkongers attempt to subvert institutionalized consumption and restructure the economic status quo through sounding and echoing in mall protests? Drawing insights from sound studies, critical theories, and ethnographic materials, this paper takes an interdisciplinary approach to study the phenomenon of which sonic activism restructured the city\u2019s networked economic relations and local everyday entanglement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ** ** ** ** **<\/p>\n\n\n\n Erinn E. Knyt <\/strong>is Professor of Music History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her B.A. in Music with highest honors (U.C. Davis), an M.M. in Music (Stanford University), and a Ph.D. in Music and Humanities (Stanford University). Knyt specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, aesthetics, music history pedagogy, performance practice issues, and Bach reception, and has written extensively about Ferruccio Busoni. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals, including the Journal of the Royal Musical Association<\/em>, American Music<\/em>, the Journal of Musicology<\/em>, the Journal of Music History Pedagogy<\/em>, the Journal of Musicological Research<\/em>, Musicology Australia,<\/em> Music and Letters<\/em>, Eighteenth Century Music<\/em>, 19th-Century Music<\/em>, Nineteenth-Century Music Review<\/em>, and Twentieth Century Music<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her first book (Indiana University Press, 2017), which explores Busoni\u2019s relationship with early and mid-career composition mentees, was awarded an AMS 75 Pays Endowment Book Subvention. Her second book Ferruccio Busoni as Architect of Sound <\/em>appeared in 2023 with Oxford University Press and was awarded an American Musicological Society book subvention. Her third book J.S. Bach\u2019s \u201cGoldberg Variations\u201d Reimagined <\/em>is also under contract with Oxford University Press. Knyt was honored with the 2018 American Musicological Society Teaching Award. <\/p>\n\n\n\n ** ** ** ** **<\/p>\n\n\n\n Virginia Jansen<\/strong> is pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Music at Boston University, with a concentration in Historical Musicology, and a minor in African American Studies. In her work, she aims to explore the influence of vernacular music on the formation of an American classical music. She has taken particular interest in the music of Florence Price and completed a large-scale research project on her chamber music. Her other areas of interest include the music of Anthony Philip Heinrich, the study of musical borrowing, and music and identity. At Boston University, she has earned the Clare Hodgson Meeker Fellowship, the Arts Research Award from the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Project, the Alice M. Brennan Humanities Award, and the Provost\u2019s Scholar Award. She hopes to pursue a graduate degree in Historical Musicology and continue her research in American music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ** ** ** ** **<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jeana Melilli<\/strong> is a PhD candidate in Musicology at the University of Florida. Her dissertation, \u201cRe-examining the Dismissed: Cecilia Macca and Nineteenth-Century Sicilian Sacred Music,\u201d uncovers the work of the composer and nun Cecilia Macca, whose compositions continued the eighteenth-century Neapolitan musical traditions brought to the town of Noto, Sicily by her teacher, Paolo Altieri. Other research areas include the late trio and accompanied sonatas of Southern Italy, performance practice and gender studies. Jeana is also Principal Flute of the Savannah Philharmonic and Piccolo\/Third Flute of the Greenville Symphony. She is a founding member of the historical ensembles Savannah Baroque and the Vista Ensemble, and she started the Baroque ensemble Lux Solaris<\/em> at the University of Florida.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ** ** ** ** **<\/p>\n\n\n\n Zac Stewart<\/strong>, a Ph.D. candidate in music history, studies French music-making during and following the Second World War, exploring how non-avant-garde operas engaged with contemporaneous events and political issues. His dissertation examines how French listeners used operas, often on historical subjects, to process the violence of the German occupation, the flourishing of authoritarian and conservative politics, postwar entanglements in colonial Indochina and Algeria, and Franco-German rapprochement. Through these operas he considers the role of music in mediating between collective historical memories, and contemporary politics and identities. In 2021-2022 Zac conducted archival research in Paris, funded by a Georges Lurcy Fellowship and as a visiting scholar (pensionnaire \u00e9tranger<\/em>) at the \u00c9cole normale sup\u00e9rieure. In 2020 he received an M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet Research Grant from the American Musicological Society. Recent papers stemming from his dissertation include \u201cDarius Milhaud, Sim\u00f3n Bol\u00edvar, and Hugo Ch\u00e1vez\u201d; \u201cProcessing Trauma in Poulenc\u2019s\u00a0Dialogues des Carm\u00e9lites<\/em>\u201d at the 2022 American Musicological Society Annual Meeting; and \u201cWhat happened to M\u00e8re Marie?\u201d at the 2023 Transnational Opera Studies Conference. Prior to coming to Yale, Zac took an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, funded by a Dr. Herchel Smith Fellowship. He holds a B.A. from Williams College, where he was awarded the Shirley Stanton Prize in Music and Highest Honors in Music, and spent a year as a visiting undergraduate at the University of Oxford under the auspices of the Williams-Exeter Programme. In addition to his research on French music, Zac also retains interests in music-text relationships, global music histories, material studies, and queer musicology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ** ** ** ** **<\/p>\n\n\n\n Violinist, conductor, and historian, Robert Whitehouse Eshbach<\/strong> is an honors graduate of Yale University (BA), where he majored in music history and German literature. He studied violin at the Vienna Conservatory with Walter Barylli, concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic and State Opera Orchestras, and earned a Master of Music degree in violin at New England Conservatory under Eric Rosenblith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eshbach\u2019s recent publications and invited papers have focused on nineteenth-century musicians: Joachim, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Robert and Clara Schumann, Reinecke, Ede Rem\u00e9nyi, and Wilhelmine Norman-Neruda (Lady Hall\u00e9). His article, \u201c\u2018For all are born to the ideal\u2019: Joseph Joachim and Bettina von Arnim\u201d appeared in the November 2020, issue of Music & Letters. Eshbach\u2019s volume, The Creative Worlds of Joseph Joachim<\/em>, co-edited with Valerie Goertzen of Loyola University New Orleans, was published in 2021 by Boydell & Brewer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ** ** ** ** **<\/p>\n\n\n\n James Thomas<\/strong> (any pronouns) is a pianist, composer, and aspiring musicologist from Calgary, Alberta. He earned a BMus in composition from Dalhousie University in 2023, and is currently pursuing an MA in musicology at Dalhousie. His current research interests are gender nonconformity and nineteenth-century pianism, sexuality in Parisian salon culture, and construction of artistic personae. James\u2019s research intersects with gender and disability studies, which inform his work in the emerging field of trans musicology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ***********<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Winnie W. C. Lai <\/strong>(she\/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in music at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), specializing in (ethno)musicology and sound studies. She avidly ruminates on the theoretical entanglements of (un)sounding matters, listening bodies, power, and the political. She experiments with intermedial methods and field materials to craft spaces for sensory experience. Winnie is completing a hybrid-mode dissertation entitled \u201cSounding Freedom: Political Aurality and Sound Acts in Hong Kong (Post-)Protest Spaces\u201d with her adviser, Professor Jairo Moreno. She has received recognition from institutions worldwide, including, for instance, the Price Lab Andrew W. Mellon Mid-Doctoral Fellowship in Digital Humanities (2022-2023), the SEM 21st<\/sup> Century Fellowship (2023), and a Charles Seeger Prize (2021), honorable mention. Before her academic journey, Winnie won the Best Music Video Award from Sony Music Entertainment (Hong Kong) and later worked as a singer-songwriter, who is now named Michiru W. For more details about Winnie, please visit https:\/\/www.winniesound.info\/.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n ***********<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Abstracts A Portrait of Musical Cubism: Ferruccio Busoni and the Sonatina Seconda Erinn E. Knyt (University of Massachusetts Amherst) In 1917, a reviewer for the Musical Courier described Ferruccio Busoni\u2019s …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":1388,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1397","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newengland.ams-net.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newengland.ams-net.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newengland.ams-net.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newengland.ams-net.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newengland.ams-net.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1397"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.newengland.ams-net.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1398,"href":"https:\/\/www.newengland.ams-net.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1397\/revisions\/1398"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newengland.ams-net.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newengland.ams-net.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\n\n\nPresenter Bios<\/h2>\n\n\n\n