ABSTRACTS
Orchestrating Whiteness: Ethnicity, Race, and Conceptions of Musical Value at the Boston Symphony Orchestra
Ayden Adler (University of Houston – Downtown)
Institutionalized musicology has supported systems of whiteness that have often insulated the music performed by symphony orchestras from racial critique. Orchestral history, however, cannot be detached from the racial narratives that have shaped American society. Nineteenth-century texts that separated “classical” music from the “modern,” “light,” or “popular,” promoted an aesthetic based on “homogeneity” and “purity.” By offering such a predominantly Austro-Germanic, “classical” canon at the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO)—and dissociating that repertory from the Pops—Brahmin cultural leaders established a bounded corpus of “good” music, attached to it a set of cultural values that justified the preeminence of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant society, and linked “classical” music to the promulgation of a racial ideal. My work situates the people behind the BSO—its Boards of Trustees, conductors, musicians, and audience—and the aesthetic sensibilities they held with regard to the music they loved, within the broader social and political forces affecting the United States from the 1880s through the 1940s, including deeply-ingrained conceptions of race.
Examining previously untapped archival materials at the BSO, Boston University, and the Boston Public Library through the lens of whiteness studies (Jacobson, Painter, Roediger, Young, et. al.), my work correlates Arthur Farwell’s 1904 observation, that “serious musical enterprises are all labeled ‘Made in Germany,’” with Bostonians’ deep-rooted fear regarding the arrival of approximately fifteen million Eastern and Southern European immigrants who journeyed to the United States between 1890 and WWI. Into the mid-twentieth century, the Jewish-born conductors Serge Koussevitzky and Arthur Fiedler carefully constructed their own ethnic/racial identities within the context of rampant anti-Semitism. Historicizing the aesthetic sensibilities of the BSO’s trustees, administrators, conductors, musicians, and audience as racially contingent sheds new light on the social forces at work at the BSO and, more generally, on institutionalized systems of whiteness that underpin American institutions of “high” art.
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Operatic Institutional Responsibility for Sexual Misconduct
Anna Valcour (Brandeis University)
(Please note: this abstract has trigger warnings for discussions of sexual harassment and assault.)
“They’re not going to fire him — they’ll fire me,” young mezzo-soprano Patricia Wulf intoned in 1998 after enduring repeated sexual harassment by an internationally-renowned opera singer. In the wake of #MeToo, some of the opera industry’s most distinguished leaders faced allegations of sexual misconduct from within the operatic community. Surrounding these survivor narratives were years of whispered warnings by industry members of known predators, fears and accounts of retaliation, threats, and gaslighting, as well as a lack of confidence in the competency and moral compass of operatic institutions.
While post-#MeToo musicological scholarship has delved into gendered violence within operatic literature, it is mostly an examination of representations of sexual assault and misogyny. It does not confront what it is like to ‘fall in love’ with your abuser every performance, re-live personal trauma under glaring lights, or be gaslit by industry professionals into silence backstage. Thus, it is paramount to pivot our musicological scholarship to address present-day circumstances and its people – a concept Naomi André has coined as “engaged musicology.” My research emphasizes the gross (mis)handling of sexual misconduct within the U.S. operatic industry and its subsequent protection of and belated accountability for the actions of powerful men like James Levine, Stephen Lord, and Plácido Domingo. I argue that power dynamics, hierarchies within the institution, and hegemonic acceptance of sexism and sexual harassment coupled with structural prerogatives to perpetuate a culture of silence and fear, make operatic institutions culpable for the sexual abuses of power by prominent men in the industry.
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Augusta Holmès’s Musical Solidarity at the Borders
Danielle Roman (New York University)
French composer Augusta Holmès (1847-1903) has too often been defined by two aspects of her biography: Camille Saint-Saëns’s declaration of her as France’s “muse” and her position as a female composer in the Third Republic. Scholarship has continued to base Holmès’s importance on the men with whom she interacted as well as fix her identity both to this gendered signifier and within the French nation-state. This focus is narrow, however, and lacks an exploration of the various identities she held in her private life and displayed publicly through her career. In addition to this Parisian republican identity, Holmès was also of Catholic Irish revolutionary persuasion, of Scottish-British descent, as well as involved in the movement for women’s suffrage. Holmès’s shifting relationship to these multivalent identities throughout her life and musical career attend to issues of cosmopolitanism, gender, and political radicalism in this era of revolutionary nationalism in Europe. Her musical compositions likewise put these identities on display, from her heralding of the accomplishments of the Republic in the Ode Triomphale (1889) to her plea for Irish independence in Irlande (1882). This paper explores these aspects of her legacy in and between Paris and Ireland, situating Holmès at the intersection of the complex social and political discourse in this period.
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Biedermeier Musical Culture in Ferruccio Busoni’s Die Brautwahl
Erinn Knyt (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Ferruccio Busoni’s nearly lifelong admiration for E.T.A. Hoffmann contributed to his selection of Die Brautwahl as the basis for his first completed opera. Premiering in 1912, the opera not only preserves much of Hoffmann’s original dialogue, but also depicts the Biedermeier musical culture of Hoffmann’s Berlin.
While much has already been written about Busoni’s translation of Hoffmann’s text into an opera libretto, and of the relationship between his aesthetic ideals and Hoffmann’s, including their shared interest in mixing the fantastic and the realistic, there has been very little consideration of Busoni’s evocation of Hoffmann’s Biedermeier culture through music. His simple but contrasting treatment of the vocal lines went against the grain of both heroic Germanic and Italian virtuosic operatic singing traditions in the twentieth century. Moreover, references to instrumental dance, march, and salon-style keyboard music coupled with the songful vocal style of lied reference the Berlin Biedermeier bourgeoisie culture depicted in the plot. Quotations of music by Gioacchino Rossini and other composers from the early nineteenth century reinforce the historical connections.
Yet the opera is hardly retrogressive. Busoni contrasts these historical references with experimental orchestral writing and a new approach to form representative of his own time. In the process of documenting Busoni’s references to musical Biedermeier culture in Die Brautwahl, the essay not only sheds additional light on Busoni’s least studied opera and its indebtedness to Hoffmann, but also contributes new knowledge about the development of post-Wagnerian German language comic opera.
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The Things We Play Today: Renewed Nostalgias in Brad Mehldau’s Views of the Beatles
Jason McCool (Boston College)
A wide, and no doubt woefully simplified, view of American popular music suggests that the twentieth-century contained two halves, characterized by two vastly different approaches. In the first, popular music and jazz were dominated by the standards model, whereby songs were composed (often on Tin Pan Alley), while performers interpreted them. In the second half, launched in the 1950s–just before the Beatles began their careers–rock & roll’s new paradigm demanded that performers write and perform original material.
And yet, though their performance aesthetics share more with the second model, the Beatles’ songs and their continued dissemination draws from the first. Because of this, “covers” of Beatles songs reveal the continued durability of the standards model, embedding historical performance practices in the present, opening a tantalizing, and potentially nostalgic, cross-generational dialogue.
Given that context, this paper will examine how Beatles songs have been interpreted by jazz musicians over the past quarter-century, focusing in particular on the live Beatles cover album Your Mother Should Know, by American pianist Brad Mehldau, set for release in February, 2023. For over two decades, Mehldau has been a leading exponent of contemporary jazz piano, fusing the cerebral swing stylings of Bill Evans with the harmonic catharsis of popular bands like Radiohead. While Mehldau has covered many Beatles songs, his most popular recording is a 1997 cover of Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird,” which has received over 7.6 million plays on Spotify. Mehldau’s prismatic “views of the Beatles” reveal an eclectic array of pianistic influences, including Bach-ian counterpoint, boogie-woogie, straight-ahead swing, and the pulsing ecstasies of Keith Jarrett’s improvised solo piano concerts. What does it mean when Beatles songs become standards, in such luxurious, historically-resonant contexts? How musically malleable are these songs, and how do contemporary interpretations of them reflect and renew our shared Transatlantic cultural nostalgias?
SPEAKER BIOS
With degrees from Princeton University (A.B.), the Juilliard School (M.M.), and the Eastman School of Music (M.A., D.M.A., Ph.D.), Ayden Adler currently serves as Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Houston-Downtown, where she teaches and directs the undergraduate arts administration program (200+ students from diverse backgrounds), and teaches in the MA in Nonprofit Management program. Dr. Adler’s vision is to sustain the arts through robust inclusivity and diversity, superlative artistry, and innovative approaches to audience engagement and retention. Her academic research focuses on the history of arts and culture institutions in the United States from the Gilded Age to the present. Her current book project, Orchestrating Whiteness: Serge Koussevitzky, Arthur Fiedler, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, under contract with the University of Illinois Press, addresses the historical roots of systemic racism in classical music in the United States. Previously, Dr. Adler served as Dean of the Conservatory at Michael Tilson Thomas’s New World Symphony, as Dean of the School of Music at DePauw University, and as Executive Director of the world-renowned Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Dr. Adler is a Chief Executive Global Fellow of National Arts Strategies and a research affiliate of the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project. She serves as an accreditor for the National Association of Schools of Music and as a director on the board of the College Music Society and the Chumir Foundation. She has recorded for the Harmonia Mundi label and is a voting member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (Grammy Awards).
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Anna Valcour is currently a Ph.D. student in Musicology at Brandeis University while simultaneously earning her M.A. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies. She holds a M.M. in Voice from the University of North Texas, a B.M. in Vocal Performance, and a B.A. in History from Lawrence University. Her research interests include witchcraft and demonology in Lieder, cultic groups and music, voice-based analysis, and exploitation within the operatic industry. In addition to her scholarly pursuits, Anna is a professional opera singer; she has performed with the Dallas Opera, Toledo Opera, Cedar Rapids Opera, Opera MODO, and Ann Arbor Opera.
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Danielle Roman is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at New York University, where she is writing a dissertation entitled “The Irish Musical Revolution(s): Suffragist, Immigrant, and Transnational Interventions in Domestic Space, 1880-1930.” Danielle will be an NYU Graduate Research Initiative Fellow in London starting in January 2023. Danielle currently serves as student representative for the AMS Greater New York Chapter. She spent most of last summer in rural Donegal through an Irish language award from the Ireland-U.S. Commission for Educational Exchange. She earned a Master’s degree in musicology from the University of Cambridge in 2020.
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Erinn E. Knyt is Professor of Music History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her B.A. in Music with highest honors (U.C. Davis), an M.M. in Music (Stanford University), and a Ph.D. in Music and Humanities (Stanford University). Knyt specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, aesthetics, music history pedagogy, performance practice issues, and Bach reception, and has written extensively about Ferruccio Busoni. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals, including the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, American Music, the Journal of Musicology, the Journal of Music History Pedagogy, the Journal of Musicological Research, Musicology Australia, Music and Letters, Eighteenth Century Music, 19th-Century Music, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and Twentieth Century Music. Her first book (Indiana University Press, 2017), which explores Busoni’s relationship with early and mid-career composition mentees, was awarded an AMS 75 Pays Endowment Book Subvention. Two additional books, Ferruccio Busoni as Architect of Sound and J.S. Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” Reimagined are currently under contract with Oxford University Press, and the former was also awarded an American Musicological Society book subvention. Knyt was honored with the 2018 American Musicological Society Teaching Award.
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Dr. Jason McCool comes from a long line of Irishmen who have been asked, “Is that your real last name?!” A native of Brockton, Massachusetts, he has wide-ranging academic interests centering on American cultural memory, with forays into musical theater, jazz, Irish singing, Gustav Mahler, and Keith Jarrett. His doctoral work at Boston University examined the racial resonances of the musical Hamilton. Jason was a 2018 fellow at San Francisco’s Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, and his writing has appeared in The Boston Globe. He is in his fifth year teaching as an Part-Time Professor of Music at Boston College.