American Musicological Society

Capital Chapter

Spring 2000 Program and Abstracts

Program

9:30 coffee

10:00 Session 1: Lowens Award finalists, Denise Gallo, chair

1. Jarl Hulbert (University of Maryland, College Park), "Hummel's Pedagogical Influence on Chopin"
2. James A. DeWire (University of Virginia), "Conflict Embodied: Agency in Brahms' D Minor Piano Concerto"
3. Renee Lapp Norris (University of Maryland, College Park), "Blackface Minstrelsy, Opera, and Antebellum Popular Culture"

11:30 Break for Voting

11:40 Business Meeting

12:15 Lunch

1:30 Session 2

1. Mark Katz, "Turntablism"
2. JoAnn Udovich, "Performance, Transformation, and Catholic Ideology in the Liturgical Organ Music of Frescobaldi"
3. Stuart Cheney, "A Newly Discovered 17th-Century Source of French Hunting Horn Signals"

Jarl Hulbert, "Hummel's Pedagogical Influence on Chopin"

A close examination of the teaching styles of Frederic Chopin and Johann Nepomuk Hummel reveals deep similarities. These similarities indicate that Hummel exerted an influence on Chopin's musical ideas stronger than previously thought.

The primary pedagogical influence on Chopin appears to be Hummel's Piano Method of 1828. Some influences are immediately apparent and have been touched lightly by some researchers, such as Chopin's use of Hummel's fingering and adherence to Hummel's views on practice habits. I have not found any research, however, mentioning that Chopin taught posture and relaxation at the keyboard as denoted in Hummel's method, and that both Chopin's utilization of vocal music to teach phrasing and his instrument preferences were anticipated by Hummel. References made by Chopin to his students and in his sketch for a method indicate that these similarities were not coincidental.

These findings help explain the roots of Chopin's musical thought and tend to disaffirm the popular notion that Chopin's manner of teaching was wholly original. They also suggest reasons for Chopin's apparent disinclination to establish an independent school of piano technique.

James A. DeWire, "Conflict Embodied: Agency in Brahms' D Minor Piano Concerto"

Brahms has a fascinating historical role as a composer who was grounded firmly in the tradition of German art music and yet explored areas outside the harmonic language of that tradition. In the first movement of the Piano Concerto in D minor, Op. 15, he creates progressions that contradict tonal norms and develops them in relation to normal tonal conventions. The theorist Joseph Dubiel has described these conflicting progressions perceptively, but he ignores the generic implications of analyzing a concerto. Brahms uses the most dramatic aspect of the concerto form, the struggle between soloist and orchestra, to create a harmonic confrontation where the orchestra introduces and prolongs the non-tonal progressions, and the soloist represents the forces of normal tonality. I offer an analysis that pays attention to the interaction between the two agents in the concerto, and how, together, they elaborate and resolve the non-tonal progressions. The result is a way of listening to the piece that not only points up the tension between the soloist and the orchestra, but Brahms the academician and Brahms the progressive as well.

Renee Lapp Norris, "Blackface Minstrelsy, Opera, and Antebellum Popular Culture"

At first glance, it appears that few musical-theatrical genres could be more distinct than blackface minstrelsy and opera. Nevertheless, the presumptive gulf between these genres was frequently crossed by various minstrel troupes that parodied opera texts and performance styles. During the late-1840s and the 1850's opera became widely popular but was criticized as ostentatious and undemocratic. Its validity was debated in the press while a parade of European opera stars appeared before American audiences. The simultaneous popularity and criticism of Italian opera made it ripe material for enterprising blackface minstrels. Some minstrel troupes, such as Christy's Minstrels, responded to opera's conflicted reception by performing opera parody songs. The humor of these parodies is primarily based in the reinterpretation of opera scenes in a comic blackface context. Troupes also performed pieces that burlesqued operatic musical conventions, foreign-language parody songs, and other comic numbers. These pieces served to ridicule opera while allowing minstrels to hang on the coattails of opera's success.

This response to the contradictory nature of opera's reception was one of many forays made by minstrels into popular culture. Although the blackface mask continually reminded audiences of minstrels' primary parody subject, blackface also became a performance convention used to represent a multitude of ethnicities and social issues. Therefore, in addition to demonstrating the close proximity of opera and minstrelsy in antebellum culture, blackface opera parody songs can be placed in the larger context of minstrel performers' willingness to appropriate any aspect of popular culture that potentially could fill their auditoriums.

Mark Katz, "Turntablism"

Of all the musical instruments introduced in this century, one of the least likely has been the phonograph. Though intended solely as a playback device, the machine has for decades been exploited as a means for creating, and not simply recreating, music. This practice has come to be known as turntablism. Working with pre-recorded discs and the machine's most basic functions--rotation speed and direction--composers and performers have invented an astonishing variety of musical effects and produced a substantial repertoire.
Turntablism has flourished as both avant-garde and hip-hop art. Avant-garde turntablism traces its roots to early musique concrete and the phonograph works of John Cage (e.g., Imaginary Landscape No. 1, from 1939), and is characterized by its collaboration with traditional instruments, its use of turntable ensembles, and its juxtaposition of diverse musical styles. Hip-hop turntablism dates to 1977, when Theodore Livingston (a.k.a. Grand Wizard Theodore) invented scratching, a practice in which pre-recorded discs are manually rotated underneath a phonograph's stylus. Hip-hop turntablism now comprises an array of complex techniques (including chirping, scribbling, tearing, and beat juggling), and may be heard in solo and ensemble performance in hip-hop (and, increasingly, in rock and jazz) groups.

JoAnn Udovich, "Performance, Transformation, and Catholic Ideology in the Liturgical Organ Music of Frescobaldi"

Music has received little attention in the growing literature of performance theory, despite music's seemingly obvious role as non-narrative language. Although textbook definitions of Renaissance and Baroque organ Masses routinely describe the substitution of non-texted instrumental pieces for various parts of the Proper of the Mass, this paper will take a more critical look at the performative function that these organ pieces provided in the ritual and theology of the Mass. The paper will argue that these non-texted genres articulated on an emotional level the transformation inherent in the sacrament of the Eucharist, as it was understood after the Council of Trent, in a way that mere words could not convey.

The organ works of Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643) are of particular interest in this context. Frescobaldi played a unique role as a non-clerical participant in Rome during the period of reform following the Council of Trent, and the paper will speculate on the ways in which his organ works reflect the ideas of the cardinals and theologians who were his Roman compatriots and employers. It will also consider the issues of the developing Eucharistic theology in early modern Italy in light of the changing science and the increasing emphasis on the veneration of the sacrament.

Frescobaldi's Fiori musicali was published in 1635 under the patronage of the Barberini pope Urban VIII. It was only four years before that the elderly Galileo was condemned in a sermon by the Jesuit Orazio Grassi. Recent scholarship has elucidated the threat to the Eucharistic theory that Galileo's works represented. It is a poignant irony of history that the same papacy that condemned and imprisoned Galileo for his narrative texts rewarded Frescobaldi's wordless contribution to Eucharistic performance.

Stuart Cheney, "A Newly Discovered 17th-Century Source of French Hunting Horn Signals"

A manuscript copied in Paris beginning in 1666 and currently housed at the Library of Congress (M2.1.T2 17c case) sheds new light on several aspects of late seventeenth-century French instrumental practice. Most significantly, its horn signals--notated in a unique tablature system that indicates articulation, relative pitch, and rhythm--are some of the earliest examples of horn notation to indicate more than a single pitch. Moreover, the inclusion of horn signals together with pieces for viol and violin also raises interesting questions about the manuscript's owner, who was probably a young man being trained for the music profession.

We know that horn signals consisting of different pitches began to be notated sometime after Mersenne's discussion of the instrument (Harmonie universelle, 1636-7), which illustrated signals consisting of a single pitch, and before the signals copied by Andre Danican Philidor at least 50 years later, which contain seven pitches. Such a shift may have coincided with the transformation of the helicon horn into the hoop-like instrument (trompe de chasse) worn over the shoulder, which evidently occurred during the same period. The horn signals in the Library of Congress manuscript present new evidence to fill this gap. The 25 signals call for five distinct pitches in a notation that also hints at rhythmic duration and groupings. Also new in this source is the increase in the number of articulation syllables from one to at least five. In addition, comparison of the Library of Congress and Philodor signals yields interesting melodic relationships.

The history of the hunting horn's repertoire and its notation is sketchy between 1636 and c. 1700, the beginning of Marc-Antoine Dampierre's career; by the 1730s Dampierre had established the basis of a tradition that still persists in France and Belgium. The sizeable repertoire of horn signals in the Library of Congress manuscript not only provides clear evidence of the practices from this cricial late seventeenth-century period and, together with the viol and violin works contained therein, but also reveals new information on the training of professional musicians.