AMS/SMT Seattle 2004
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AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY SOCIETY FOR MUSIC THEORY SEATTLE, NOVEMBER 11-14, 2004 PROGRAM & ABSTRACTS AMS Abstracts Contents Thursday afternoon, November American Voices (SMT) Compositional Strategies in Renaissance Sacred Music (AMS) Elliott Carter (AMS/SMT Joint Session) Harmonic Issues in Popular Music (SMT) Iconography (AMS) Knowing and Thinking Music in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (AMS) Orchestral Issues (AMS) Pedagogy (SMT) Politics and Music in Mid-Twentieth-Century Europe (AMS) Problems in Wozzeck (AMS) Rhythm, Meter, Hypermeter (SMT) The Sacred in the Nineteenth Century (AMS) Wagner and Strauss (SMT) Thursday Evening Panel Discussion: Heresies and Hear Says Revisited: Thoughts on Instru- mental Performance of Untexted Parts and Repertories, – (AMS) Interpreting Brahms’s Ambiguities (SMT) Friday morning, November African-American Musics (AMS) Film Topics (AMS) German Romanticism (AMS) Group Theory, Networks, Transformations (SMT) Medieval Compositional Materials (AMS) Musical Space and Time (SMT) Nature and Culture in France (AMS) Sacred Spectacle in Medieval Tuscany (AMS) Schubert (SMT) Women and Music in Early Modern Europe (AMS) Friday afternoon (Dis)continuous Forms (SMT) Early Medieval Theory (AMS) iv AMS/SMT Seattle Feminist Perspectives (SMT) History of Theory (SMT) Importing and Exporting Opera (AMS) Ligeti (SMT) Memory, Sentiment, Place (AMS) Music and Confessional Politics in the Holy Roman Empire (AMS) Noise and Notation in Trouvère Music (AMS) Popular Music (AMS/SMT Soint Session) Regicide and Music (AMS) Rhetoric and Allegory in the Baroque (AMS) 9 Schenker (SMT) Transposition (SMT) Twentieth-Century Russian Music (AMS) AMS Presidential Forum: “The AMS at Your Service” Friday evening Disability Studies in Music (AMS) Performance and Analyis: Views from Theory, Musicology, and Perfor- mance (SMT) Stefan Wolpe and Dialectics (SMT) Saturday morning, November Franco-Russian Tonalities (AMS) Groove and Repetition (SMT) Haydn (AMS/SMT Joint Session) Music, Medicine, Disorder (AMS) Nineteenth-Century Music (SMT) Problems in Baroque Opera (AMS) Race In and As Performance (AMS) Rituals, Books, and Performers in Renaissance Cathedrals (AMS) Schoenberg (AMS) Twentieth-Century Modernism (SMT) Saturday afternoon Alterity in Late Romantic Opera (AMS) The Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century French Music (AMS) Dance (AMS) Jazz (AMS) Late Medieval Issues (AMS) Recording Music (AMS) Rhythm across Continents (AMS) Contents v Viewing Music over Time (AMS) Confluence of Musical Cultures: Seattle New Music Ensemble Quake (SMT) Saturday evening Imperialism and Western Music c. –: Directions for Future Research (AMS) Sunday morning, November History of Theory (AMS/SMT Joint Session) Jazz Harmony and Rhythm (SMT) Music in Nineteenth-Century German Culture (AMS) North American Voices (AMS) Performance and Reception, – (AMS) Performers and Audiences in Renaissance Florence (AMS) Ritual, Time, and the Foreign in Twentieth-Century Music (AMS) Rousseau (AMS) Schoenberg and Webern (SMT) Shostakovich (AMS/SMT Joint Session) A Useable Past for Seicento Opera (AMS) Vocal Music at the Piano (AMS) 167 Index of Authors, Panelists, and Session Chairs Thursday afternoon, November AMERICAN VOICES (SMT) Lynne Rogers, Oberlin Conservatory, Chair Comparative Analysis as a Tool for Assessing Influences on the Development of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Early Musical Style Ronald Squibbs University of Connecticut The dual influences of Alexander Scriabin and Dane Rudhyar on the development of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s early style (–) are frequently mentioned in the literature on the music of this period. While some initial stylistic comparisons have been undertaken by others, these tend to focus on general issues such as texture and chord voicing without devoting detailed attention to other important structural factors. The present study exam- ines three works—Scriabin’s Prelude, Op. No. (), Rudhyar’s Surging from Mo- ments (–), and Crawford’s Prelude No. ()—taking into account stylistically relevant issues such as harmonic vocabulary, voice leading, and formal design. Because of its specificity with regard to structural factors, comparative analysis has the potential to lead to a more nuanced and more musically convincing understanding of the notion of influence during this important period in the development of American modernism. Mel Powell’s Calculus of Dynamism Jeffrey Perry Louisiana State University The accomplishments of Mel Powell (–) in both jazz and avant-garde circles are well acknowledged, as witness both his Pulitzer Prize in music and the continuing sales of jazz recordings he made in the s. His accomplishments as a theorist and pedagogue are less well documented. This paper draws on published and unpublished sources to articulate the system of kineforms that forms the centerpiece of Powell’s compo- sitional method. For Powell, music is an interplay between moments of flux and moments of crystallization; the analyst must identify the various indices of these two qualities in any given work. (In the course of music history, the predominant indices of flux and crystalli- zation changed in certain obvious ways, but remained surprisingly similar in others.) In this paper, the kineform system provides analytical insight into selected works by Powell him- self. A disconnect has evolved between analytically and theoretically oriented approaches to the post-tonal repertoire. Powell’s kineform system suggests one solution to this prob- lem, providing a system of contextual analysis that draws on a succinct set of flexible, adaptable theoretical premises with provocative connections to powerful theories, such as Schenker’s structural levels, Lewinian transformation theory, the Darcy/Hepokoski notion of rotational form, and Kurthian energetics. Abstracts Thursday afternoon COMPOSITIONAL STRATEGIES IN RENAISSANCE SACRED MUSIC (AMS) Richard Sherr, Smith College, Chair Psallite noe! Christmas Carols in the Renaissance Motet Thomas Schmidt-Beste University of Heidelberg In , Jennifer Bloxam pointed out that Johannes Regis, in his Christmas motet O admirabile commercium, was probably the first composer to incorporate popular Latin song into sophisticated art music. Bloxam also named Brumel’s Nato canunt omnia as directly emulating this practice. This is not the whole story, however – several more motets (by Bertrandus Vaqueras, Ninot le Petit, etc.) make use of similar or identical models. These compositions are unique in their time for their inclusion of popular song material, particu- larly as it is treated not in cantus firmus fashion, but in the form of direct quotation, rhythm and all. Also, a number of Franco-Flemish Christmas motets (by Obrecht, Mouton, Sermisy, etc.) contain refrains on the word “Noe” or “Noel” in similar fashion. This paper places the practice of “song-quoting” Christmas motets in a broader cultural context. For one, it is no accident that this stylistic cross-over is found exclusively in compositions linked to the one feast in which elements of popular devotion are strongest, and for which the singing of strophic Latin songs (“carols,” “noels,” etc.) is most amply documented. Their predomi- nantly Flemish and northern French provenance also points to a possible association with the devotio moderna, a lay order very influential and widespread in Holland, Flanders and neighboring territories in the fifteenth century; in its musical sources, great emphasis is placed on Christmas songs in simple polyphony which appear to be the immediate source of the motets in question. Two Early Morales Magnificats Kenneth Kreitner University of Memphis To all outward appearances, Cristóbal de Morales arrived in Rome in and began to write music then; his current earliest datable work is a motet copied in , and his publications began in the s. Yet clearly this impression cannot be right: Morales came to Rome in his mid-thirties and from prestigious chapelmaster jobs in Ávila and Plasencia, and the early Roman works show a level of sophistication that can only be born of long experience. This paper explores the pre-Roman style of Morales through two previously unpub- lished compositions, both Magnificats, preserved only in Iberian sources and clearly dating from the years before the composer’s departure from the peninsula. One is incomplete in Toledo (in a section dated ) but complete in later sources, and attributed unambigu- ously. The other is an unicum in Tarazona /, a manuscript probably copied between and , and is attributed to somebody named Morales, with an initial that has been interpreted variously as indicating Cristóbal and two minor musicians, Francisco and Rodrigo Morales. Thursday afternoon AMS/SMT Seattle Both are substantial and mature compositions; on stylistic grounds I am convinced that they are the work of the same person, and the circumstantial evidence leaves no doubt that this person must be Cristóbal. They are thus an invaluable testimony to Morales’s early career. Even more important, they show clear signs of debt to his predecessors and teachers, Escobar and Peñalosa, and explicit prefigurings of the style that would shortly make his Roman Magnificats famous around the world. Another Look at Polyphonic Borrowing: Cristóbal de Morales, “Parody” Technique, and the Missa “Vulnerasti cor meum” Alison McFarland Louisiana State University One of the least-understood compositional processes of the mid sixteenth century is the borrowing