AMS-NE: New England Chapter of the AMS

AMS-NE Chapter Meeting Saturday, April 14, 2012 Mt. Holyoke College Monica Chieffo, "Maria’s Veils, Salome’s Machinery: The Dance Scene in Metropolis and Salome" Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) has been judged by critics and scholars as a hallmark in the history of cinema and as the site of contentious statements about modernity, such as the aestheticization of technology and overtly formulaic gender roles. At the center of this discourse is the figure of the female robot Maria. In his influential analysis of the film, Andreas Huyssen notes how the perspective of the camera lens coincides with the male gaze, suggesting that the robot is constructed and subsequently animated by male vision throughout the film narrative. The film’s five-minute dance sequence—wherein the robot Maria emerges from an ornate urn to dance for a room full of male dinner guests—is reduced therefore to an instance of male vision. Huyssen leaves out completely any discussion of the...

AMS-NE Chapter Meeting Saturday, February 4, 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology DOUBLE SESSIONS MORNING SESSION A (Killian Hall):   Part 1: Analysis and Interpretation of Classical Music Alex Ludwig, "Is Haydn Too Funny for Hepokoski and Darcy? Examining Haydn's Presence in H & D's Sonata Theory" In their massive book Elements of Sonata Theory , James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy on multiple occasions allude to –– or explicitly detail –– Joseph Haydn’s well-known proclivity towards the use of humor and wit. In doing so, they portray his compositional practice as falling outside of normal conventions, as in this discussion of recapitulatory material: “Thus Haydn provided his audience with a witty work cleverly suspended in the force fields of at least three formal categories (277).” At times, the reader can almost visualize Hepokoski and Darcy throwing their hands up in desperation at Haydn’s “startlingly original musical language (16)...

AMS-NE Chapter Meeting Saturday, October 1, 2011 Capital Community College Max DeCurtins, "Changing Contexts for Bach Reception in Israel" In February 1927, an all-Bach concert at Terra Santa College appeared in the performance series of the Jerusalem Musical Society. The program notes began: “Bach occupies in the musical world the same position as Moses in the religious. He established its Torah on which everything else was subsequently built.” This venerating prose, read by attendees at one of the earliest documented Bach performances in the future State of Israel, offers a glimpse into the beginnings of the reception of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music there. The language is nothing if not charged—with religious ideas as well as ideas of musical heritage. The conflation of the musical and the religious stems from the nineteenth-century German context from which many Zionist movements began. The program notes almost seem to proclaim the secure position...