AMS-NE: New England Chapter of the AMS

**PLEASE NOTE: Due to the aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013, this meeting was cancelled. Papers that were read at the following Fall Chapter meeting are marked below.*** The abstracts for the papers are included here, but the meeting did not take place. Melanie Lowe, "Topics of Consumer Identity in the 1780s: Pleyel’s op. 1 and Mozart’s op. 10 String Quartets" By considering the role of topics in the musical experience of late eighteenth-century amateur musical consumers, this paper addresses: 1) the role of burgeoning consumerism in the formation of taste and consumer identity; and 2) relationships between patterns of consumption and musical style. While there is frustratingly little documentation that reveals the listening experiences of amateur consumers, the music itself offers a rich source of information. As practitioners of a rhetorical art, eighteenth-century composers tailored their music for a specific audience. Given the commercial r...

AMS-NE Chapter Meeting Saturday, February 2, 2013 Tufts University Louis Epstein, "Triple Threat: Ida Rubinstein as Patron, Impresario, and Director" Between 1928 and 1934, Ida Rubinstein and her Ballets Rubinstein presented four ambitious seasons of original works in Paris, filling a gap left by the demise of the Ballets Russes and defying the economic downturn that hobbled other cultural institutions. Like the Ballets Russes, whose opulet, exoticist performances of Cléopâtre and Schéhérezade in 1909 and 1910 had made Rubinstein a household name, the Ballets Rubinstein featured mainly foreign performers and visual artists in big budget spectacles that married dance, mime, music, and declamation. Rubinstein solicited musical scores almost exclusively from contemporary French composers. Rubinstein – who funded, managed, and directed her productions – offered exceptionally lucrative commissions to Ravel, Stravinsky, Auric, Milhaud, Honegger, Sauguet, and Ibert...

AMS-NE Chapter Meeting Saturday, September 29, 2012 College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, MA) Erin Jerome, "Haydn’s L’incontro improvviso : Deceitful Dervishes, Greedy Servants, and the Meta- Performance of Alla Turca Style" Haydn’s L’incontro improvviso (1775), a reworking of Gluck’s La Rencontre imprévue (1764), was composed as part of the festivities surrounding the four-day visit to Eszterháza of Archduke Ferdinand, Habsburg governor of Milan, and his wife, Maria Beatrice d’Este.  With its overture in "Turkish" style, Egyptian setting, and standard bduction plot, the opera was in keeping with the exotic theme characterizing the courtly spectacles for the royal visit.  “Castagno, castagna,” a patently orientalized begging song that the scheming Calender performs for the slave Osmin, among other unsuspecting victims, has often been cited as a textbook example of alla turca style.

The seeming simplicity of this aria, however, masks an underly...