American Musicological Society

Capital Chapter

Spring 2001 Program and Abstracts

Program

9:30 am refreshments

10:00 Session I: finalists in the Irving Lowens Competition for student research

11:30 Special Program: Music at Virginia State University, Past and Present Ethel Norris Haughton and VSU music students

12:00 lunch

1:30 business meeting

2:00 Session II

A Forgotten Masterpiece: The Historical Significance of Hummel's Septet, Op. 74, Jarl Hulbert

Student of Mozart and Haydn, colleague of Beethoven, and teacher sought after by figures like Carl Czerny, Adam Liszt (for his son Franz), and Robert Schumann - such are some credentials of the child-prodigy-turned-European-superstar, Johann Nepomuk Hummel. Despite his outstanding résumé, music historians have generally dismissed Hummel as second-rate. As a result, many of his compositions, including his Opus 74 Septet, have suffered from a lack of research.Unlike many of his compositions that faded from view with the progression of Romanticism, Hummel's Septet enjoyed a rich nineteenth-century performance history not thoroughly addressed in the general literature. This paper will make use of a number of nineteenth-century journals to document and examine the Septet's performance history. Conclusions reached will be analyzed in conjunction with an investigation of the work's unique features and their historical consequences. According to François-Joseph Fétis, Hummel's compositions had placed him among the most distinguished composers of the nineteenth century (though his fame has doubtlessly been overshadowed by Beethoven's). Exploring the reasons for the Septet's disappearance from the concert stage will shed new light on Hummel's peculiar legacy and put a fresh perspective on the historical value of his compositions.

The Mazurkas of Karol Szymanowski
Matthew Bengston

When Frederic Chopin wrote his mazurkas for piano, the inclusion of Polish folk music and Chopin's harmonic originality came like an exotic breath of fresh air into the musical world. However, later attempts to compose mazurkas suffered from the repetitious formal structures; these pieces sounded like outmoded salon music of little stature, and did not show the composers at their best. In the 1920's, Karol Szymanowski was inspired by recent political developments and ambitiously sought to create a national musical culture in Poland, a country where music had languished. He chose to focus his creative attentions on the piano mazurka: a logical choice, given the Polish tradition from Chopin, but also a daring one, given the later history of the genre. The product of his efforts is the collection of 22 highly original mazurkas. In these, Szymanowski created new possibilities for the mazurka genre and for Polish music in general. Aspects of Szymanowski's musical language are considered, including harmony, form, use of the instrument, and the treatment of repetition. Special attention is paid to the inspiration for the mazurkas: the folk music in the Podhale region of the Tatra mountains. The stature of his mazurkas is evaluated in the contexts of his career, his own writings and oeuvre, the history of Polish music, his relationship with Chopin, and the history of the mazurka genre.

The Place of Music in the Old Order Amish Community of Lancaster, Pennsylvania: An Ethnography Collected Under the Technological Restrictions of the Plain People
Deborah Justice

When the ethnomusicologist steps into the field, her tape recorder is likely to be her most important piece of equipment. But what if the society under observation prohibits tape recorders, video cameras, and electricity? During my five week-long fieldwork among the Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania this lack of technology was a challenge. All of my ethnographic description, musical analysis, and transcription of Old Order Amish music were based on my memories of the events and a few discreetly taken notes.Since the Amish are the focus of much attention, scholarly and otherwise, investigating outsiders are viewed with a degree of suspicion. Access to information hinges on friendly sources who will vouch for the researcher in the community. Recruiting an Amish source generally requires assurance from the researcher that all material will be used strictly for academic purposes, treated with appropriate Christian reverence, and not be broadcast over the radio. Having gained the confidence of a few community members, I was able to attend musical events and hear the singing. Children's songs and informal singing repertoire, in English and Pennsylvania Dutch, are considerably more accessible than the formal singing and church music that are conducted in German. Amish music is also completely participatory, so researcher automatically becomes participant-observer in the trilingual singing. In addition to presenting a sorely needed revision of the role of music in contemporary Amish life, this paper will address the ways in which experience (gained through participation) balances the lack of technology.

"Due opere . . . di buona poesia, e di buona musica": Innovation in Opera at Turin Margaret Butler

The men who ran Turin's Royal Opera Theater in the eighteenth century were
assigned the task of creating "two operas [per season] with good music and poetry." Responding to this simply-worded charge, they made choices regarding aspects of operatic production that resulted in some of the most elaborate, spectacular, and experimental productions of opera seria to appear in the Italian states during the second half of the century. Standing in close geographical proximity to the other major European operatic centers, Turin's Teatro Regio was exposed to and participated in many of the cross-currents of innovation that influenced Italian serious opera at mid-century. The theater's directorship played a crucial role in the formation of Turinese operatic style as much in its selection of creative personnel and libretto texts and subjects as in its choices regarding finances and other practical matters of production. Archival material recording the directors' activities offers insight into the administration's decision-making process. Evidence from manuscript scores and printed librettos reveals that the directors actively sought to participate in the efforts toward the reform of opera that began to occur in other cultural centers around mid-century, efforts which Italian theaters are generally assumed to have ignored. This study explores innovations and the conditions under which they occurred in representative operas from Turin from the 1750s to the 70s.

IN DEFENSE OF A VICTORY: LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN'S OPUS 91
Simon Sommer

This paper attempts to reevaluate Ludwig van Beethoven's Opus 91, Wellingtons Sieg oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria. Although this work was Beethoven's most successful composition during his lifetime, music history to date has either ignored it or stigmatized it as the "nadir" (Maynard Solomon) or "lowest point" (Alfred Einstein) of Beethoven's ³vre, unworthy of a great composer. Various attempts to explain why Beethoven composed such a "potboiler" (Carl Dahlhaus, Solomon) tend to follow Anton Schindler's erroneous assumption that the Viennese mechanic, Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, both conceived the piece and composed large portions of it for his mechanical organ Panharmonicon. Beethoven scholarship has almost deliberately judged this allegedly inferior composition based on erroneous information. Close analysis of the primary sources, however, provides evidence that Beethoven composed Opus 91 almost entirely himself, and that at least the first part was never designated for the Panharmonicon. The musical analysis exhibits Beethoven's inner conflict with composing a victory celebration, his previous admiration for Napoleon, and his political ideas. Wellingtons Sieg oder die Schlacht bei Vittoria is, therefore, much more than descriptive tone-painting. It is a statement of a political composer, musically linking the traditional Battaglia genre with modern, symphonic music.

Dangerous Dialogues, Borrowed Techniques: How Copland Made Serialism His Own
Jennifer DeLapp

Following World War II, a number of established composers not associated with the Second Viennese School began experimenting with twelve-tone techniques. Stravinsky, Ginastera, Barber, Sessions, and Copland are among the composers who used serial techniques late in their careers. Copland's Quartet for Piano and Strings (1950) was one of the first works by a mature composer outside Schoenberg's circles to use dodecaphony.How extensive was Copland's use of Schoenberg's methods? How familiar was he with twelve-tone theory? What does his use of the technique say about Copland's compositional development? Building on the analyses of David Conte and James McGowan, this paper first will demonstrate how Copland adapted serial techniques to serve his own aesthetic ideals. Next, a critical examination of the twelve-tone scores Copland owned, his writings about the Second Viennese School, and the theory book that may have been his twelve-tone primer, will reveal his changing opinions of dodecaphony, and the extent of his familiarity with it. Finally, using Copland's writings about serialism and about the Piano Quartet, the paper will propose an interpretation of the work that takes into account the politically nuanced, extramusical meanings of tonality and serialism in the early years of the Cold War. Copland once stated that the "black and white thinking" encouraged by the Cold War climate was stifling to artists, because it discouraged dialogue. Indeed, Copland's painful brushes with anti-Communists convinced him to withdraw from political debate. But on a musical plane, the Piano Quartet was a forum within which Copland could safely explore common ground between apparent ideological opposites--tonality and
serialism--with fruitful artistic results.