AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts

American Musicological Society American Musicological American ASHGATENew Music Titles from Musicological Ashgate Publishing… Society Program & Abstracts 2009 Come visit our booth in the book exhibit! www.ashgate.com/music Abstracts Philadelphia − November AMS Abstracts Contents Thursday afternoon, 12 November 28 Athanasius Kircher 30 Bicoastal America 32 Chansons and Chansonniers 35 Death and Transfiguration 37 Jazz Migrations 41 Music and Philosophy 43 Players and Listeners 47 Reds Thursday evening, 12 November 51 Music in Jewish Life During and After the Third Reich 52 Music for the Common Man: Handel, Purcell, and London’s Eighteenth-Century Entertainments Friday morning, 13 November 53 Ars Antiqua Ars Nova 57 From Singer to Editor: Implications of Transferal 60 Looking Forward, Looking Back 64 Policing Music 67 Popular Genres in the Early Twentieth Century 70 Tracing the Path Friday noon, 13 November 74 Piano Masterworks of Mexican Nationalism 75 Un deluvio di lagrime: The Lirone and the Seventeenth-Century Roman Lament 76 Presenting the Past: Historically Inspired Improvisation in the style galant Friday afternoon, 13 November 78 Chant Topics 80 Men and Music 81 Performing Under Suspicion: Generic Conventions and African American Female Singers 86 Renaissance Italy 89 Schumann and Mendelssohn 93 Seventy-Five Years of AMS: Why Now is the Time for Ecomusicology 94 Stagings 97 World War II and its Aftermath Friday evening, 13 November 101 Debating Musical Identity: Shifts in Aesthetic Understandings in Mexico from the Seventeenth to the twentieth Century 105 Staging the Baroque: Perils and Pleasures of Baroque Opera DVDs in the classroom 106 Transatlantic Connections Saturday morning, 14 November 108 American Recorded Repertories 112 Displacements 116 Frankish Chant: Diverse Responses to Rome 120 Haydn 123 Music Historiography in Cold War Contexts 124 Performance Practices 128 Representation in the Third Republic Saturday noon, 14 November 132 An Early Sixteenth-Century Mass Introduced: The Anonymous Missa sine nomine in JenaU 21 133 Piano Music in Vienna beyond the Second Viennese School: An Exploration of the Repertories in the Context of Alban Berg’s Piano Sonata, op. 1 134 Walter Gieseking as Composer: Premieres of representative works from his unpublished manuscripts Saturday afternoon, 14 November 135 American Modernism 139 British Topics 142 France: The Long View 146 Imaginary Landscapes 150 “Only Connect”: The Role of Musicology in Community Engagement 151 Sacred and Secular Polyphony in Florence and Ferrara, c. 1430–1480 154 Wagner and Mahler Saturday evening, 14 November 159 Opera and the THeater of Pluralism 161 Virtuoso Improvisation: Musical Practices and Musicological Discourses Sunday morning, 15 November 162 Cage and Company 166 Cinematic Imagination 169 Colonial Consequences 173 Eighteenth-Century Vienna 175 German Chant and Liturgy 178 Restoration Publishing 180 Voices 251 Index of Participants 255 Maps Thursday afternoon, 12 November ATHANASIUS KIRCHER David Crook, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Chair The past decade has seen a resurgence of interest in Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), a Jesuit polymath and one of the leading intellectual figures of the seventeenth century. Because of his penchant for exaggeration and his tendency to include everything he could find on a given topic—“no matter how strange or dubious”—Kircher’s reputation had already begun to wane by the late seventeenth century. Recent research by historians of science and linguistics, however, demonstrates that Kircher’s work was of critical importance to the scholarly community of his time. In addition to publishing at least forty volumes on magnetism, optics, geology, medicine, linguistics, Egyptology, and early medicine, Kircher corresponded with hundreds of scholars in more than twenty languages. Situated at the leading Jesuit college in Rome, he had unparalleled access to a global network of missionaries and researchers. A 2001 conference devoted to Kircher drew scholars from over a dozen disciplines, including luminaries such as Stephen Jay Gould and Anthony Grafton, in an attempt to comprehend his massive output. Many institutions and libraries have followed with conferences, seminars, and special events on Kircher. While Kircher has recently begun to excite the interest of a few German and Italian music scholars, music scholarship has not been at the center of the current Kircher revival. This is all the more surprising given that music is one of the few disciplines that continued to be in- fluenced by Kircher’s writings well after his death. Kircher devoted two of his most successful publications entirely to music, including the giant 1,200-page treatise Musurgia universalis (Rome, 1650), an encyclopedia of music and music theory. He also timed the publication of Musurgia (one of his longest works) to coincide with the Jubilee Year of 1650, thus ensuring wide exposure. Hundreds of copies were distributed around the globe, making it the most widely-distributed and influential music treatise of the seventeenth century, a treatise that continued to be used as a primary source by musicians and scholars for over 150 years. Father Kircher’S SINGING Sloth (AND OTHER WONDERS OF THE New WORLD) Eric Bianchi Yale University Athanasius Kircher crammed his mammoth music treatise Musurgia Universalis (Rome, 1650) full with, apparently, everything he had ever heard about music. Courtesy of a fellow Jesuit priest stationed in South America, he brought readers face to face with a marvel from the New World: a sloth that sang—perfectly—the Guidonian hexachord. This account has subsequently been discussed as an example of Kircher’s credulity, as well as his unparalleled ability to amaze early modern readers with the strange, the exotic, and the novel. The sloth was strange and exotic, but it was not novel—not even in1650 . Beginning in the 1520s, the animal was discussed, depicted, and dissected in dozens of printed sources. Not only musicians, but also mathematicians, clerics, explorers, and natural historians weighed in on this remarkable creature. Their accounts formed the basis of Kircher’s, despite his claims to the contrary. Few of Father Kircher’s words were actually his own. Abstracts Thursday afternoon 29 Starting from Kircher’s discussions of the singing sloth and the Guidonian hexachord, I reconstruct a largely forgotten world of seventeenth-century erudition, and suggest what place music scholarship had in it. With particular attention to visual images from early modern books, I suggest how and why Kircher fashioned his account and image as he did—and why they appeared in a music treatise at all. In that age of polymaths, music scholarship was not solely the domain of musicians, nor was it necessarily written for them. Even at his most extreme, the famously digressive Kircher (best known in his day as a mathematician, linguist, and Egyptologist) may be more representative than is generally supposed. Kircher was drawn to the sloth by more than his love for the exotic. As the self-anointed Christian Pliny, he saw himself continuing the comprehensive natural history that the pagan Roman had begun. As the most famous professor at the Catholic world’s leading educational institution (the Collegio Romano), he was expected to rehabilitate the image of Catholic scholarship and science in the wake of Galileo’s condemnation. He was fascinated by Guido of Arezzo, who emerges in Musurgia as a Catholic superhero: a devout cleric who devised the hexachord, invented polyphony, notation, and even keyboard instruments. Guido and his hexachord were the perfect emblems for Kircher’s larger intellectual project: a sacred science that demonstrated the unity of all things and the universality of the Catholic Church. But what had fascinated seventeenth-century readers seemed unscholarly and unscientific to music scholars of the eighteenth century, who responded to Musurgia with skepticism and derision. Father Kircher’S Miraculous MECHANICAL MUSIC-MAKING METHOD John Z. McKay Harvard University Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia universalis (1650) is—as the title suggests—a treatise on “universal music-making.” Previous studies have emphasized the universal and musical aspects of Kircher’s writing, both within his specific discussions of the Harmony of the Spheres and as a reflection of the larger project of a1200 -page encyclopedia of seventeenth-century music. Few, however, have ventured into his detailed instructions on the making of music. This trend is in part the fault of a more accessible 1662 German translation, which left out over two-thirds of Kircher’s original Latin text. The translation retained brief discussions of philosophical and magical elements of music that bookend the treatise, but vast sections of practical theory and instructions for music-making that make up the bulk of the text were completely omitted. Among the missing portions is a 200-page description, located near the end of the treatise, of an automatic method for composition that Kircher identifies in his preface as the culmination of much of the work that precedes it. By considering the purpose, sources, and output of this compositional algorithm, my paper reevaluates Musurgia’s practical goals in the light of new evidence that challenges the accepted view of Kircher’s place within the world of seventeenth- century music and music theory. Drawing on theoretical discussions of the ars combinatoria from Mersenne’s Harmonie uni- verselle (1636), Kircher proposes a more workable method for generating musical settings. Dozens of complex tables provide the raw musical material for four-part settings in seventeenth-century counterpoint. Unlike later eighteenth-century dice games that usually limit themselves to short compositions with a preset number of measures, Kircher has a much 30 Thursday afternoon AMS Philadelphia 2009 grander vision of being able to set any text—of any length, in any language, in prose or any poetic meter—to music. Kircher even designed a “music-making ark,” a box containing wooden slats that can be arranged to produce counterpoint using his algorithm, which com- plemented and simplified his method for truly universal music-making.

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