AMS/Library of Congress Lecture Series: Previous lectures
Spring 2010: Steve Swayne (Dartmouth College), "William Schuman’s Puzzling Seventh Symphony"
Webcast coming soon!
Steve Swayne writes, "My lecture delves into the circumstances surrounding the composition of the Seventh Symphony by William Schuman. Commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the fall of 1954, it was premiered in the fall of 1960, nearly five years after the seventy-fifth anniversary of the BSO, for which the work was commissioned. Schuman’s correspondence unexpectedly reveals that much of the Seventh Symphony was written not for Boston, but for the Philadelphia Orchestra. Only when the Philadelphia commission collapsed did Schuman repurpose the already-composed music for Boston. Still more intriguing is the presence of a twelve-tone row as the opening subject of the first movement. While others have noted the presence of twelve-tone harmonies in Schuman’s music, to my knowledge no one has ever remarked on this unusual appearance of a twelve-tone melody. The manuscript of the Seventh Symphony in the Koussevitzky Collection of the Library of Congress solves the puzzle about the Philadelphia-Boston connection. A heretofore unknown piano sketch among the Library’s Schuman manuscripts answers how the twelve-tone melody came into being and marks the Seventh Symphony as the beginning of other twelve-tone explorations in his compositions."
Fall 2009: Walter Frisch (Columbia University), "Arnold Schoenberg's Creative Journey, 1897-1912"
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This lecture will focus on Arnold Schoenberg’s extraordinary development as a composer across fifteen years near the beginning of his career, from 1897 to 1912, a period framed by his early string quartet in D major and the melodramas of Pierrot Lunaire. Schoenberg went from being little known outside a small circle in Vienna to gaining wide recognition across Europe, and even beyond, as a leading musical modernist. Between 1897 and 1912 Schoenberg’s work undergoes profound transformations: from a style based firmly in that of Brahms; to more complex treatment of form, counterpoint, and chromatic harmony that owes much to Wagner and Mahler; and then to an intuitively developed atonality and a novel method of text-setting that would provide important models for other twentieth-century composers. The lecture will draw on correspondence and on autograph musical sources held at the Library of Congress, including manuscripts of the first three string quartets (the D-Major; op. 7; and op. 10); the sextet Verklärte Nacht, op. 4; and Pierrot lunaire, op. 21.”
Spring 2009: Jeffrey Magee (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), "Now It Can Be Told: The Unknown Irving Berlin"
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After Jerome Kern famously pronounced that 'Irving Berlin is American music' in 1925, Berlin continued for several decades more to define many of America’s most distinctive musical idioms, from Tin Pan Alley to Broadway to Hollywood. Berlin’s death twenty years ago at the age of 101 accelerated an ever-expanding cottage industry of commentary, reflection, and scholarship on a legendary figure about whom it might have seemed there was nothing more to say. In fact, we have only scratched the surface of the vast legacy of the twentieth century’s most prolific songwriter. That has become more apparent since 1992, when Berlin’s daughters presented his papers to the Library of Congress, creating new opportunities to reassess a major figure in American music. In an effort to amplify patterns in Berlin’s stage and screen career, the talk will aim to draw connections among unknown (or little-known) materials--including songs, scripts, 'plot treatments,' and other notable documents--and Berlin’s better-known work.
Fall 2008: Annegret Fauser (University of North Carolina), "After Pearl Harbor: Music, War, and the Library of Congress"
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Music of all kinds had a powerful role to play in World War II, and on each side, both Axis and Allied. Many American composers and performers offered their services in the cause of morale and victory. It is perhaps surprising, however, that one of the pivotal institutions in this musical war was the Music Division of the Library of Congress, led by its then Chief, Dr. Harold Spivacke. Today Spivacke is probably best known for his role in commissioning Aaron Copland’s 1944 ballet for Martha Graham, Appalachian Spring, when he served as musical advisor to Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. My presentation of Spivacke’s (and the Library’s) musical activities during World War II provides a microcosmic exploration of music’s various roles during World War II in America, given that his involvement touched upon almost every aspect of music in this country. I will explore the rich materials of the Library, including Spivacke’s correspondence with musicians such as Barber, Copland and Milhaud, documents relating to his activity as the Chair of the Subcommittee on Music of the Joint Army and Navy Committee of Welfare and Recreation, and the Library’s involvement in the war-time concerts and commissions for the Coolidge Auditorium—the very same space in which this lecture will take place.
Spring 2008: Judith Tick (Northeastern University), "Ruth Crawford Seeger, Modernist Composer in the Folk Revival: Biography as Music History"
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Shortly after the death of the musicologist Charles Seeger, his children gave his papers and those of their mother, the composer Ruth
Crawford Seeger, to the Music Division of the Library of Congress,” said Tick. “Without
yet knowing what to look for or why, I mad-dashed through one box after another.
The boxes contained manuscripts of unpublished songs and chamber music, typescripts
of unpublished scholarship on American folk music, Christmas card-photos of the Seeger
family, unfinished thank-you notes, grant applications, and personal diaries through which
an obscure artist and woman spoke directly to my scholar’s instincts and feminist heart.
I would return to these documents many times, and I ended up editing some of the unpublished scores. As time passed, the documents slowed me down into considering the relation between narrative truth and historical truth. They said to me: ‘Handle us with care. We are combustible. We set off chain-reactions. One thing leads to another.’ Through music to life; through a life to history. The goal of my lecture is to revisit content and process in practicing musical biography in relation to Crawford Seeger’s legacy. Music validates a composer. Our experience of that music shapes the questions we ask about a composer’s life. As life and art intertwine, so biographical narrative illuminates the history of culture.
