Allegheny Chapter of the American Musicological Society

Saturday, April 17
Zoom Meeting

Zoom link: https://gannon.zoom.us/j/84296917533?pwd=ZHp0L2cxZVBlbUFDR2VFOXhxbnBPUT09

Program:

Opening Remarks by Allegheny Chapter President, Mark Durrand

10:30AM EST – Individual Paper Session 1
Chair: Megan Woller (Gannon University)

  • Jon Churchill (Duke University)
    “It’s Not Lambkins Frisking At All”: The Ruptured Discourse of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony
    Abstract: Critics have long cast Ralph Vaughan Williams as an isolated pastoralist, and such characterizations misrepresent his Pastoral Symphony’s genesis in the Great War. The work’s pastoral features—low dynamics, reed timbres, and modal pitch language—often overshadow its static disjunctions in rhythmic, pitch, and phrase parameters. I highlight the formal and expressive functions of these ruptures, illustrating how Pvt. Vaughan Williams engaged with continental trends in disjunction while recalling the soundscape of the trenches.  
  • Lacey Golaszewski (State University of New York at Fredonia and Medaille College)
    From Ovid to Bourdieu: Canon, Genre, and the Othering of Winds in Western Art Music Scholarship
    Abstract: Canon and genre have long played a role in reportorial marginalizations. Non-canonical genres were once regarded as impermissible for research; scholars have since made strides in overcoming this marginalization. However, some genres remain underexplored, including wind chamber music. In this paper, I argue that an Othering of winds in the West is in part responsible. By analyzing the reception history of wind chamber music in musicology and demonstrating the Othering of winds throughout the millennia, I indicate that marginalizations are more complex than previously understood. Moreover, I offer a nuanced comprehension of such exclusions, paving the way for their elimination.
  • Devon Osamu Tipp (University of Pittsburgh, Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellow in Music Theory/Composition)
    Mamoru Fujieda’s Plant Language: Cultural Feedback and New Approaches to Traditional Japanese Instruments
    Abstract: My paper explores specific techniques and structural components that highlight central aspects of the musical language of the post minimalist and microtonal composer Mamoru Fujieda (b. 1955.) By examining the Third Collection “Koto Gamelan Set” from his ongoing magnum opus “Patterns of Plants” (1995-) I will present a case study that highlights the use compositional tools used in traditional Japanese, Indonesian, and contemporary music and the subsequent rewards and opportunities offered by this ongoing feedback loop. 

12:00 PM EST Lunch Break

1:00 PM EST – Individual Paper Session 2
Chair: Megan Woller (Gannon University)

  • César Leal (Sunderman Conservatory of Music–Gettysburg College)
    Parisian View(s) of Black America in the fin-de-siècle Salon Culture
    Abstract: This paper explores the ambivalence towards the Other (culture and race) in artistic venues and private salons of colonial (white) France during the fin-de-siècle. It focuses on re-interpretations of Black-American culture (as different from American culture) and reveals how the popularity of vernacular genres like the cakewalk prompted an internal dialogue around France’s own issues of national identity vis-à-vis class and race.
  • Nate Ruechel (Florida State University)
    Immigration Law as a Framework for Interpreting Aaron Copland’s Early Music
    Abstract: This paper proposes that a process of race-making intensified by American immigration policy during the beginning of the twentieth century provides a context for a new interpretation of Aaron Copland’s early music. Laws such as the Immigration Act of 1924 codified a perception that Eastern European Jewish ethnicity was incompatible with collective notions of American identity. Copland’s Music for the Theatre, a work which he claimed articulated an explicitly Americanist rhetoric, contests this legal discourse by referencing the music of Tin Pan Alley and the spaces associated with variety theater—two cultural institutions strongly associated with Eastern European Jewish communities. 
  • Peter Graff (Denison University) 
    Reimagining Music for Radio Drama: Norman Corwin’s Dramatic Writing for the Columbia Workshop
    Abstract: In 1936, CBS launched a radio program called the Columbia Workshop, which sought to raise the artistic merit of American radio drama by encouraging experimentations in form, content, and sound design. This paper examines the program’s musical advances by surveying the contributions of radio playwright Norman Corwin. Across his writings for the Workshop, Corwin uses music extensively, often satirically with characters calling attention to its very existence in the broadcast. By demanding that audiences listen to both word and score, Corwin broke with established precedent and forever changed the rules of the broadcast medium.

2:30PM EST – Business Meeting