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Harvard University Department of M usic MUSICn e w s l e t t e r Vol. 9, No. 1/Winter 2009 Suzannah Clark: New Constructs for Analyzing Schubert Music Building Associate Professor Suzannah Clark received “WE HAVE TO THINK OF North Yard her BMus and MMus from King’s College DIFFERENT WAYS OF UN- Harvard University London, and an MFA and PhD from Princ- DERSTANDING SCHUBERT. Cambridge, MA 02138 eton. She held a Junior Research Fellowship WHAT I’M TRYING TO DO and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship IS TO USE SCHUBERT AS A at Merton College, Oxford before taking up a MEANS TO CRITIQUE MUSIC 617-495-2791 faculty post as a University Lecturer and Fel- THEORY, AND TURN AROUND www.music.fas.harvard.edu low of Merton College, and College Lecturer WHAT HAPPENED IN THE at University College. Clark spent the 2007 19TH CENTURY WHEN MU- spring semester as Visiting Assistant Professor at SIC THEORY WAS USED TO Harvard, and joined the faculty in 2008. CRITIQUE SCHUBERT.” INSIDE “There’s a reason it’s called Analyzing Schubert,” change. The late 19th century was a period in which says Associate Professor Suzannah Clark of her theorists increasingly wanted to explain music from 2 Faculty News most recent book project. “I’m interested in how an intellectual point of view, and as one English people have analyzed and thought about Schubert’s writer, Henry Heathcote Statham, believed, once 2 Save the date: Early Music music from his own time up to ours. But I’m also people understood the rules of musical form they’d Conference looking at how his personality—how Schubert understand that Schubert didn’t deserve his growing 4 Graduate Student News the man—has been a factor in the ways theorists reputation as a great composer. “Many 19th-century and critics have thought about his music. As one writers found the music beautiful but structurally 5 Library News: Boulanger of Schubert’s friends, Edward Bauernfeld, said, flawed. The beauty made them suspicious.” As critic 6 The Music Brain ‘listeners would not go astray if they judge Schubert Hubert Parry wrote, of all composers Schubert de- from his songs to have been a man full of affection pended most on the attractiveness of his musical 7 Sound Preservation Toolkit and goodness of heart.’” ideas; he had no sense for abstract design—he was Available for Dowload It was all very romantic, the way Schubert liable to plunge recklessly and let design take its was imagined. “Michael Vogl, Schubert’s main chance. 7 Undergraduate News singer, said the composer was clairvoyant; that his Twentieth-century Schubert studies took a 8 Alumni News manner of composing transported him while writ- different tack: to say the music was flawed, they 9 Crosscurrents Conference ing—everything flowed out of him,” notes Clark. posited, was to misunderstand difference. “You hear Vogl’s description repeated often, but in That’s where Clark comes in. 10 Bernstein Web Archive reality, very few saw Schubert compose. What we “We have to think of different ways of under- Launched know is that he worked 9am to 2pm every day, at standing Schubert. What I’m trying to do is to use a desk. What kind of romantic composer has office Schubert as a means to critique music theory, and 11 Calendar of Events hours?” turn around what happened in the 19th century 12 Czernowin Appointed There was, from the beginning, a problem in when music theory was used to critique Schubert. relating the man to the music. Says Clark, “Schubert “The theorist Schenker [1868-1935] was inter- didn’t look or behave like a genius. Certainly he had ested in how music stems from a single outpouring a fluidity to the way he composed, but the idea that of the major triad. Harmonic form revolves around Department Chair he was a clairvoyant and not conscious of his own structural tonics and dominants. Schubert under- Anne C. Shreffler creations was a convenient means of explaining his plays the importance of the dominant in his music. Director of Administration diminutive appearance, unrefined behavior and If we use Schenkerian analysis on Schubert it means Nancy Shafman apparent lack of intellect.” that the most memorable bits are, structurally, the Within a half-century after the composer’s ornaments. So there’s a schism between structure Newsletter Editor death, musical thinking about Schubert began to and beauty: Schubert’s greatest melodies become Lesley Bannatyne [email protected] continued on p. 2 Clark, continued parenthetical statements. So what happens if Rome, Paris, & the Topography Faculty News we talk about the beautiful moments being the structural moments? A different logic about of Early Music: a Conference Richard Beaudoin, Lecturer on Music, pre- musical structure emerges.” Professors Christoph Wolff and Sean Gal- sented a paper entitled “Conceiving Musical Clark’s interest in Schubert began in 1992, lagher announce a conference in honor of Transdialection,” co-authored with the philoso- at a music theory exam at Princeton. She was their colleague Morton. B. Knafel Professor pher Joseph Moore, at the 66th Annual Meet- given the first movement of Schubert’s G Ma- Thomas Forrest Kelly. Slated for October 2-4, ing of the American Society for Aesthetics in jor String Quartet to analyze. “I realized that 2009, the conference will feature a keynote ad- November. His Summer Canons was premiered I couldn’t articulate what Schubert was trying dress by Craig Wright (Yale University). Other by organist Clive Driskill-Smith at St. John's to achieve using existing theoretical paradigms. speakers include Michael Huglo, Barbara Smith Square, London, in December, and a I wrote my exam suggesting that Schubert’s Haggh-Huglo, Andreas Haug, Marie-Noël premiere of Nach-Fragen, a large song-cycle music illuminated an inadequacy in music Colette, David Hiley, Katarina Livljanic, on texts by Christa Wolf, will be premiered theory.” Alejandro Planchart, Dom Daniel Saulnier, by Annette Dasch, soprano and Wolfram Clark went on to write her dissertation Matthew Peattie, Susan Rankin, Arni Ingólfs- Rieger, piano, at both the Concertgebouw in on Schubert’s instrumental music, and her son, Andreas Pfisterer, Virginia Brown, Susan Amsterdam and the Konzerthaus-Dortmund forthcoming Analyzing Schubert includes Boynton, Iain Fenlon, and Peter Bloom. in March. subsequent research on both the songs and Conference registration information will be Visiting composer Michael Gandolfi’s instrumental music. “The most well-known available in May, 2009. new CD, The Garden of Cosmic Speculation works bring out all the issues—Schubert’s (with Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony Great Symphony, Unfinished Symphony, Trout Orchestra, on Telarc), received a Grammy Quintet, G Major Quartet, C Major Quintet. nomination for the category “Best Classical They’re famous because they’re fantastic. And Contemporary Composition.” Another CD, they’re infamous for the problems they pose for Y2k Compliant (with Gil Rose and the Boston music theorists.” Modern Orchestra Project on the BMOP Analyzing Schubert is slated for publication Sound label), was listed as a New York Times by Cambridge University Press in 2010. Record of the Year. Two articles edited by Visiting Professor Ellie M. Hisama for the Journal of the Society The Shepherdess’ Refrain Theory graduate students John for American Music (JSAM) have won major efore Clark became interested in Schubert studies she McKay and Rowland Moseley talk awards: Christopher Reynolds’s article “‘Porgy with Professor Christopher Hasty and Bess’: An American Wozzeck,” won the Bpursued a master’s degree at King’s College, focusing on at the department holiday party; the 13th-century French motet and its intersection with the later, students, faculty, and staff American Musicological Society’s H. Colin trouvères repertory through the use of “refrains,” which are sing carols. Slim Award in 2008 for “a musicological article used in the 13th century both as repeated snippets of text and music within a piece but also as quotations between pieces. For her King’s College thesis, Clark produced a catalogue of 422 refrains from the medieval Montpellier manuscript, together with all their concordances. She’s recently delved back into the 13th century to contribute a chapter on singing shepherdesses in the pastourelle to Etymologies of Song, edited by Emma Dillon and Kevin Brownlee, slated for 2009 publication. Inevitably, explains Clark, the shepherdess’s song is placed in the refrain, in which she sings of her love for someone else; if she repeatedly sings about someone else, how is the knight meant to seduce her? “For me, it always comes back to a music theory issue. The fact that these refrains are often also citations from other songs tells you about intertexuality and the inter- sonic nature of song. But more playfully, the repeated refrain becomes a musical irritant for the knight: he has to negotiate with musical form. In order to seduce the shepherdess, he has to get her to sing the refrain for him.” 2 of exceptional merit” by a senior scholar, and Levin gave a lecture, “Free Will vs. Predeter- William Powell Mason Professor Carol Laurie Stras’s article “White Face, Black Voice: mination in Classical Music,” at the Siemens Oja published “Bernstein’s Musicals: Reflec- Race, Gender, and Region in the Music of the Foundation, Munich, and another, “Who tions of their Time,” in Leonard Bernstein: An Boswell Sisters,” won an ASCAP/Deems Taylor Cares if Classical Music Dies?” at the Harvard American Original, ed. Burton Bernstein and Award in the Pop Articles category in 2008. Club of Boston. In December he gave a lecture- Barbara B. Haws (New York: Collins, 2008), Hisama is Founding Editor of JSAM, and is recital on the piano works of Henri Dutilleux at as well as “Something Called Terrorism,” writ- Vice Chair and Professor of Music at Columbia the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, ten with Mark Eden Horowitz to accompany University.