2003 Fall

Abstracts

Ethel N. Haughton
"Undine Smith Moore: A Study of the Impact of African American Musical Pursuits in Petersburg, Virginia, In the Making of a Musician"
The centennial year of African American music teacher and composer Undine Smith Moore began on August 23, 2003. Analyses of her compositions have been the subjects of research, her accomplishments have been hailed, and her influences on noted musicians such as Billy Taylor and Camilla Williams have been documented, but no attention has been paid to the early experiences that encouraged her to become a musician. She was born in rural Jarrat, Virginia, and raised in Petersburg, Virginia. Though she studied at Nashville's Fisk University, an institution steeped in musical tradition, her Fisk experience began before she left Petersburg. In her 1981 keynote address at the First National Congress on Women in Music, Dr. Moore stated: "Viewed objectively by its obvious limitations, one might question Petersburg as a good place for a musician to grow up. What did Petersburg have?" She also stated that, even though African Americans were "Barred from the theaters and all but the!
gallery of the Academy of Music," the African American community had "a veritable fascination with piano study" and that its attention to a child's artistic pursuits created in that child "a fine sense of self-worth and a high level of aspiration." This paper will help to answer the question "What did Petersburg have?" by tracing the development of the musical interests of Petersburg's African American residents from the decades preceding Dr. Moore's move to the city in the early 1900s through her formative years.

Grayson Wagstaff
"Understanding the Polyphonic Passion in Sixteenth-Century Spain"
Composers in Spain during the period 1490-1550, including the school around Fernando and Isabel and the later generation headed by Cristóbal de Morales, wrote a number of settings of standard liturgical genres. These included polyphonic psalms, hymns, the Salve Regina and other Marian items, the Magnificat, and the Office for the Dead. Such settings featured a very clear presentation of the chant melodies and were closely linked to various elements of chant performance practices. Missing from this list of genres were the Passions, the Gospel accounts from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which did not become common in musical repertories in Spanish cathedrals for Holy Week until the last two decades of the sixteenth century.

The reasons for this seeming lack of interest in setting the Passions may be found in continuing improvisatory practices including the so-called more Hispano performances of the Passions, as described in the Papal chapels. This study examines the texts included in the more Hispano tradition and how this practice may have influenced later polyphonic settings. A number of other influences are considered. Polyphonic Passions in Spain may reflect devotional traditions related to events in Christ's life and to Holy Week . A Passion according to Matthew, attributed to Cristóbal de Morales by the Spanish musicologist Higini Anglés, is examined for clues about the development of the genre as a polyphonic work.

Jennifer Cable
"Alexis: A favourite Cantata"
In 1820 an English cantata was printed in London bearing the title "Alexis: A favourite Cantata" - an apt title, given that the cantata had appeared in 14 known printed versions following its original publication by John Walsh in 1710. "Alexis" was included in the volume titled "Six English Cantatas Humbly Inscribed to the most noble Marchioness of Kent", the first volume of English cantatas composed by Johann Christoph Pepusch, a German expatriate who settled in London in 1700. Walsh issued a second edition c.1720 (timed to coincide with the release of Pepusch's second volume of Six English cantatas), and a third edition c. 1731. Both sets of English cantatas were written for soprano and continuo, and most include obbligato instruments.

Pepusch used as a model the Italian chamber cantata structure of alternating recitatives and da capo arias. In composing these cantatas "after the Italian manner", Pepusch was appealing to the current English interest in Italian vocal music. Though the English cantata faded in popularity by the close of the 18th century, Pepusch's cantata "Alexis" continued to be performed well into the 19th century, and a 2-voice version
of the first aria was published as late as 1959. To date, I have identified 24 versions.
My lecture recital will trace the journey of "Alexis" from 1710 to the 20th century; explore various alterations to the cantata; present some of those alterations in performance; and discuss how specific versions reflect the musical tastes of the period in which they appeared.

Laura G. Kafka and Scott Beard
"The Songs of Fryderyk Chopin: Reflections on the Slavic soul, exploring the liaison of voice & piano"
The opus 74 songs of Fryderyk Chopin (March 1, 1810- October 17, 1849) are doubtless the least known of the composer's works and represent a most intimate and genuine reflection of his personality and Slavic heritage. Evidence suggests that Chopin may have composed twenty-one songs in all during his creative life; however, only the nineteen songs composed during the years 1829-47 were collected and published posthumously.
Although Chopin knew many of the French romantic poets personally, he never set any of their poems, nor did the French side of his musical nature find expression in any of his songs. The poems Chopin chose to set are by six contemporaries of Chopin, Polish poets whose works range from light-hearted love poems to ballads of strong patriotic sentiments.The piano accompaniments, with the exception of a few of the songs, are deliberately unadorned. In general, the songs are more in the 18th-century tradition of Polish romances and ballads rather than 19th-century art songs. Many are set in the rhythms of national Polish dances like the mazurka and the oberek and others are elegies or strophic settings of folk- like songs.

This paper/demonstration will address suggested reasons for the neglect of Chopin's songs in the concert hall, Chopin's treatment of the poetry, and the intersection of Chopin's songs with his own piano works and transcriptions by Liszt. Live performances of selected songs and related piano pieces will be offered.

Rose Theresa
"Opera as Popular Culture: Or, How Carmen Jumps Jim Crow"
At least since the nineteenth century, opera has straddled and even elided the "great divide" between high and low cultural forms. This paper addresses opera's flexible status in relation to certain circum-atlantic performance traditions of which it is a part. The focus is on Bizet's Carmen, an opera that has, remarkably, engendered roughly over eighty film versions in the past century. Carmen is also explored from a nineteenth-century perspective. It did, after all, always work to elide the high and low. Carmen was a generically lower opéra-comique rather than a full-fledged opéra and, perhaps more importantly, Bizet quite consciously incorporated recognizably popular music in the opera for purposes of characterization. Carmen's songs, such as the seguedilla and habañera, were modeled on Latin-American music then popular in the café-concerts and dance halls of Paris. This was music that set the female character apart from European high culture, "othering" her while, at the same time, evoking the physicality of bodily performance. Perhaps this is why Carmen's music has also taken on something of a cinematic life of its own. Easily detached from an opera where they perhaps seemed not to belong, the songs have made their way into numerous films where they signify in various and apparently incongruous ways. In all cases considered here-in Street Fighter, There's Something About Mary, Trainspotting and Magnolia-the songs also perform a Carmenesque straddling act that can be seen to raise the very question of what is popular and what is not.

Bradley Mariska
"'Something's Coming': The Influence of West Side Story upon Stephen Sondheim and A Little Night Music"
It is generally accepted that the "concept musicals" of Stephen Sondheim changed the face of Broadway considerably in the 1970s, beginning with Company (1970). The shows created by Sondheim consciously treated music, lyrics, and plot as a single dramatic entity, giving renewed significance to musical theatre as a true art form.
As a young songwriter in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Sondheim's collaborations with leading composers of the previous generation-namely Jule Styne, Leonard Bernstein, and Richard Rodgers-were important in defining his style. In particular, Leonard Bernstein and his score for 1957's West Side Story (for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics) foreshadowed a major change in American musical theatre. According to Humphrey Burton, Bernstein brought a "classical discipline" to the stage, "operatic stature" to the score, and "a statement which was an indictment of society." Sondheim's quest for musical and dramatic integration was influenced by his collaboration with Bernstein and can be traced to later works, particularly A Little Night Music (1973). In this paper, I will explore similarities between the composers' attitudes towards the role of musical theatre as social commentary. I will also discuss Bernstein and Sondheim's individual songwriting styles and specific musical elements utilized in West Side Story and A Little Night Music; both Bernstein and Sondheim were influenced by classical composers, utilized extended song forms, and made innovative use of leitmotifs to identify character and unify the score. I conclude by asserting that the relationship between these two important Broadway composers not only illuminates the evolution of musical theatre over the past half century, but also gives insight toward the future of the American musical stage.