(Re)Framing the Storyteller's Story in John Adams's Scheherazade.2

(Re)Framing the Storyteller’s Story in John Adams’s Scheherazade.2 A thesis submitted to The Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF MUSIC in Music History in the Division of Composition, Musicology, and Theory of the College-Conservatory of Music March 2019 by Rebecca A. Schreiber B.M., Murray State University, May 2017 Committee Chair: Jonathan Kregor, Ph.D. Abstract As a modern foil to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade (1888), John Adams’s Scheherazade.2 (2014) offers an opportunity to evaluate program music’s potential to function as contemporary social commentary through narrativity and representation. I demonstrate how Adams’s dramatic symphony serves as an effective vehicle of critique of twenty-first-century dynamics surrounding gender and ethnic identity. Both Rimsky-Korsakov and Adams drew inspiration from One Thousand and One Nights, whose narrator Scheherazade overcomes the Sultan’s brutality through her storytelling. Adams expressly offers a new interpretation of Scheherazade by evoking modern images of physical, verbal, and emotional abuse faced by women around the world. I analyze Adams’s construction of the voice of an empowered woman by parsing his program and his collaboration with performer Leila Josefowicz, for whom Adams composed the violin’s narrative role. By examining intertextual relationships of musical narrative devices and signifiers between the portrayals of Rimsky-Korsakov and Adams, I argue that the narrative construction and treatment of thematic characters in Scheherazade.2 adhere to program music conventions while simultaneously re-positioning Scheherazade as a social commentator confronting contemporary oppression. i ii Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Background 6 Chapter 2: Musical Narrativity 13 Narrative Interpretations of Scheherazade and Scheherazade.2 19 Chapter 3: Representations of Gender and Ethnicity 35 Suggestions of Femininity and Empowerment 36 Suggestions of Exoticism and Universality 44 Modes of Engagement 52 Chapter 4: Reception and Broader Implications 61 Conclusion 78 Bibliography 83 iii Lists of Examples and Figures Example 1: Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade, first movement, mm. 1-7 19 Example 2: Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade, first movement, mm. 14-17 20 Example 3: Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade, first movement, mm. 20-24 21 Example 4: Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade, second movement, mm. 5-9 22 Example 5: Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade, third movement, mm. 1-8 22 Example 6: Adams, Scheherazade.2, first movement, mm. 14-22 26 Example 7: Adams, Scheherazade.2, first movement, mm. 360-376 28 Example 8: Adams, Scheherazade.2, second movement, mm. 120-130 29 Example 9: Adams, Scheherazade.2, third movement, m. 312 30 Example 10: Adams, Scheherazade.2, fourth movement, mm. 204-210 31 Example 11: Adams, Scheherazade.2, fourth movement, mm. 214-215 32 Example 12: Adams, Scheherazade.2, fourth movement, mm. 252-263 32 Example 13: Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade, fourth movement, mm. 641-655 41 Example 14: Adams, Scheherazade.2, fourth movement, mm. 132-137 50 Figure 1: Narrative Structure of Scheherazade.2 25 Figure 2: Violinist Leila Josefowicz 55 Figure 3: Album cover of Scheherazade.2 – “I Am Its Secret,” Shirin Neshat, 1993 57 iv Chapter 1: Introduction But Scheherazade rejoiced with exceeding joy and got ready all she required and said to her younger sister, Dunyazad, “Note well what directions I entrust to thee! When I have gone in to the King I will send for thee and when thou comest to me and seest that he hath had his carnal will of me, do thou say to me: O my sister, an thou be not sleepy, relate to me some new story, delectable and delightsome, the better to speed our waking hours; and I will tell thee a tale which shall be our deliverance, if so Allah please, and which shall turn the King from his blood-thirsty custom.”1 An over-arching frame story of survival and redemption encompasses these “delectable and delightsome” tales, infused with magic and allure. The well-known collection of folktales One Thousand and One Nights presents a network of stories within stories, weaving together colorful narratives of intrigue and fantasy. Narrated by the storyteller Scheherazade in a frame of subjugation and ingenuity, this collection offers vibrant source material for composers to create imaginative musical narratives and sound-worlds. One such inspired narrative is Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite, Scheherazade, opus 35, composed in 1888. His four- movement suite portrays various scenes alluding to the tales of One Thousand and One Nights. Rimsky-Korsakov imitates the over-arching frame structure of One Thousand and One Nights as individual tales conveyed in each movement. Various themes that musically depict characters and events interact throughout the piece, with the prominent solo violin representing Scheherazade’s narrative voice. Through Scheherazade, Rimsky-Korsakov tells romantic, fantastical stories just as Scheherazade related. A more recent composition by John Adams evokes similar characteristics inspired by One Thousand and One Nights but repositioned in time to tell a modern tale. Adams’s dramatic symphony, Scheherazade.2, composed in 2014, 1 Richard Francis Burton, Tales from the Arabian Nights (New York: Fall River Press, 2012), 20. 1 introduces a twenty-first-century representation of Scheherazade.2 Rather than conveying fantastical tales as Rimsky-Korsakov did, Adams claims to address misogyny; he refers to the violence that permeates the folktales reflected in contemporary news and media images of women oppressed and violated around the world. Scheherazade.2 constructs this modern Scheherazade striving to overcome masculine brutality. Like Rimsky-Korsakov’s narrator, Scheherazade is embodied in a solo violin role composed specifically for Leila Josefowicz, whose performances lend a tangibility to the interpretation of Scheherazade Adams proposes. As a modern foil to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, John Adams’s Scheherazade.2 offers an opportunity to evaluate music’s potential to function as contemporary social commentary through narrativity and representation. Adams adheres to program music conventions to create a narrative that problematizes twenty-first-century power dynamics through his construction of gender and ethnic identity. In collaboration with violinist Leila Josefowicz, Adams creates a female persona confronting abuse and persecution (embodied in the music as the solo violin against the orchestral adversary) in a narrative that seeks to elevate the status of those whose voices are unheard. Adams’s work with Josefowicz has gained largely positive attention in the music world, and the program he presents is generally acknowledged and supported in performance settings. However, differing perspectives and ideologies challenge the agenda that Adams purports to advance, calling into question his intentions, ambiguity of the narrative, and sustainability of the piece. By considering both the positive support and the disputing perspectives, I argue overall that Scheherazade.2 successfully provokes listeners to engage with and respond to the social issues Adams highlights. 2 Adams verbally expresses the composition’s title as “Scheherazade point two.” 2 I approach Rimsky-Korsakov’s and Adams’s compositions through analysis and comparison, synthesizing diverse theories to evaluate each composer’s construction of Scheherazade. The concept of intertextuality as explained by Michael L. Klein provides a frame for comparing the two compositions. Scheherazade and Scheherazade.2 share prominent elements including a four-movement symphonic structure, orchestral instrumentation featuring a solo violin, programmatic titles and descriptions, and literary inspiration from One Thousand and One Nights, inviting an intertextual approach in seeking to derive meanings of each piece informed by the other. Klein presents intertextuality as a web of relationships; ideas can be linked in multiple directions, as a system of allusions and references that are independent of influence.3 Drawing from the work of Julia Kristeva, among others, Klein outlines the concept of a text as a space within which multiple texts interact. Any person can approach a given text and shape an individual understanding of it based on his or her perception of the internal interaction of texts in relation to the external background and experience he or she brings to the analysis. This approach allows for many possible interpretations, each perhaps considering similar elements but detailed through the individual’s identity and perspective. Klein describes different kinds of connections, not necessarily mutually exclusive, that one can consider to derive meaning in a given text: poetic intertextuality shaped by texts in the writer’s creative process, esthesic intertextuality of texts considered by societal perspectives, historical or transhistorical intertextuality considering a text in its own time or across all time, intertexts within a style or canon or beyond such boundaries.4 Following Klein’s explanation, I do not seek to suggest direct influence, but rather a web of multi-directional relationships. While I touch on many of Klein’s 3 Michael L. Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 4. 4 Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, 12. 3 types of intertextuality, I focus on esthesic interpretations, deriving meanings of Scheherazade.2

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