Current Musicology

Resisting Usefulness

Marianna Ritchey — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Arts advocacy in the U.S. tends to cultivate state and philanthropic art support by emphasizing art’s potential to increase productivity and generate revenue in various ways. Even musicologists often take this rhetorical route, arguing for the continued relevance of our work, for example by noting that studying music cultivates the kind of creative thinking skills that make workers attractive to corporations like Google. This way of promoting music and musicology thus reinforces the logic of state and capital by demonstrating music’s usefulness within that logic. I argue that we should instead embrace and pedagogically center music’s uselessness as its most potentially radical quality. Doing so could help us construct a new political imaginary that might more robustly resist the antisocial logics of capital.

My argument circles around the question of musical autonomy. While a certain version of autonomy undergirds our discipline’s tools and assumptions, today this value is dismissed by almost everyone, including leftists and liberals, activists and academics. In salvaging the autonomous ideal, I attempt to resituate it firmly within collective practice, an orientation it has traditionally been seen as transcending. My exploration of collective autonomy weaves together work from musicology, political theory, anthropology, feminist theory, and Black studies, as well as from radical activist traditions that develop outside of any institutional framework. I think with and through these diverse perspectives, arguing that celebrating music’s uselessness might aid our collective ability imagine a radically different world.

Elliott Carter's Analysis of his Piano Sonata (1945-46)

Ira Braus — Sat, 06 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In 1948, Elliott Carter penned an analysis of his Piano Sonata for Edgard Varèse. His analysis of the first movement, in particular, makes one ask why Carter did not subsume its recurrent two-tempo structure under “first group” of its sonata form. Given Carter’s sophistication, was he experiencing a moment of music historical “agnosia,” since two-tempo expositions inform familiar Beethoven works such as Piano Sonata, op.31, no.2 and String Quartet in Bb, op.130. This paper explores Carter’s “agnosia” by way of internal and external evidence. Internally, it revisits the thematic chart he attached to the 1948 analysis and goes on to posit the idea that the work’s quintal neo-tonality so saturates its thematic network themes as to distort the composer’s analysis of the form, historical precedents irrespective. Externally, the paper compares three works by Beethoven to Carter’s Sonata as regards its two-tempo structure, using concepts borrowed from Hepokoski and Darcy’s Elements of Sonata Theory (1999). Finally, the author revisits writings of Carter and his circle that may explain why his analysis downplayed historical precedents to the Piano Sonata.

Alternative Facts in Musicology and Vechnaya Pamyat' in Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5

Eileen Mah — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The assertions, refutations, and counter-refutations concerning two core pieces of Richard Taruskin’s studies on Russian music—Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5—provide a starting point for discussion about the possibilities, limits, and obligations of musicological interpretation. Moreover, an important aspect of the discussion is the phenomenon of “alternative facts,” both in publication and in pedagogy, and possibly in music itself.

Taruskin argues against the logical fallacies of overly specific or overly simplistic interpretations, but hesitates to fully interpret certain music himself, thereby participating in the web of alternative facts. Taruskin refutes popular myths about biographical meanings in Tchaikovsky’s symphony, but in so doing, also seems to reject a tragic reading of any kind. He explains away various musical structures and extroversive references, but fails to explore why those elements are in fact present.

As for Shostakovich’s symphony, Taruskin notes its saturation with musical topics, but ignores their allusive specificity, downplaying their significance altogether for what he calls their transferability. Yet Taruskin himself identifies an allusion to a specific Orthodox hymn, and therefrom draws specific conclusions. His evidence for calling the passage a “literal imitation” is actually flawed, but a truly literal quotation of this very hymn may be present throughout the entire symphony, and may act as a sort of species of alternative fact itself. In any case, something that specific, and its placement in the symphonic structure, deserve notice and demand specificity of interpretation.

A Loose Affiliation of Alleluias

Celeste Oram, Keir GoGwilt — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This article is written from our perspectives as a performer and a composer, focusing on our violin concerto, “a loose affiliation of alleluias”, which we created and premiered in 2019. Making this concerto was an exercise in excavating the material histories that guide our creative practice. Our purpose in doing so was to work towards a clear and necessarily complex appraisal of how our current practices are motivated by, and reproduce, historically-determined knowledge, authority, and cultural attitudes. We think through our own reproductions of historical knowledge via Ben Spatz’s exegesis of “technique”, and via Edward Said’s notion of “affiliations” as the networks which build up cultural associations and cultural authority. With this theoretical frame, we contextualize some of the musical techniques and tropes engaged in our concerto—for instance polyphony, ornamentation, and the concerto soloist as heroic subject.

We contextualize our reflections next to critical positions staked circumscribed by what Ben Piekut calls “elite avantgardism”—an analytical category which we see ourselves as operating within. We discuss, for instance, the critical gestures of musical modernism which (per Adorno’s analysis) conspicuously arrest and negate historical musical grammars and logics – and yet continue to reproduce its structuring values. In our concluding statements we gesture towards some of the pedagogical implications of this work, considering how creative practice can be leveraged to re-appraise the histories shaping our practices of composition, improvisation, and performance.

Opera, Sound Recording, and Critical Race Theory

Matthew Timmermans — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This review essay considers the relationships among opera, sound recording, and critical race theory, and explores them at a moment when these fields are beginning to converge. One of my concerns will be the recent and ground-breaking studies and collections on opera and race by Naomi Adele André (2017, 2019), Kira Thurman (2012, 2019), Pamela Karantonis and Dylan Robinson (2011), and Mary I. Ingraham, Joseph K. So and Roy Moodley (2016). Another will be the neglected history of opera and sound recording; notable scholars here include Karen Henson (2020), Robert Cannon (2014), and Richard Leppert (2015). Finally, I will focus on the thought-provoking analyses of race and sound by Alexander Weheliye (2005), Brian Ward (2003), Jennifer Lynn Stoever (2016) and Nina Sun Eidsheim (2019). There are obvious connections among these three bodies of scholarship, yet these connections have not yet been clearly identified and explored.

Although many scholars have come to embrace opera as a material and embodied phenomenon, the artform’s dissemination, analysis, and enjoyment through sound recording is still overlooked as a site of enquiry, especially its potential as a fertile site of inquiry about identity. To overlook the issue of identity in relation to recording is to perpetuate the belief that recordings are primarily documents of performance practice. It ignores the army of technicians who invisibly craft the acoustic object, many of whom are historically white and male. This review essay seeks to address this neglect and to suggest some ways in which the processes of making and consuming opera recordings is intimately related to whiteness and anti-Blackness—but also to Black possibility. In what follows, I cast a broad net, ranging widely and at times unexpectedly. I begin with some recent events in American musicology and in the New York operatic scene; then, turn to a consideration of some of the scholarship just mentioned; and finally conclude with a brief discussion of a specific recording, the Metropolitan Opera’s “live” sound recording of the 2019 production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess.

Robinson, Dylan. 2020. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Derek Baron — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Tunbridge, Laura. 2018. Singing in the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performances in New York and London Between the World Wars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stewart Duncan — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Brown, Rae Linda. 2020. The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Lauren Shepherd — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000