AMS-NE: New England Chapter of the AMS

AMS-NE Chapter Meeting Saturday, May 3, 2014 Providence College (RI) Ji Yeon Lee, “Tristan und Isolde and Francesca da Rimini: An Intertextual Reading” Wagner’s· Tristan und Isolde ·(1865) and Zandonai’s· Francesca da Rimini ·(1914) share important musical and dramatic similarities. Wagner and Zandonai’s compositional languages are both characterized by chromatic harmony and goal-driven mobility, although the latter’s approach is naturally more radical. Both plots portray illegitimate romance and uncontrollable passion leading the protagonists to fatal ends; furthermore,·Francesca’s narrative—drawn from “Inferno” of Dante’s La Divina Commedia—invokes·Tristan at key points. In Act 1, a minstrel recounts the Tristan story; “Isolde” is mentioned during the ladies-in-waiting scene in Act 3, as an analogy for Francesca; in the same act, Paolo’s “Daylight is my enemy, the night is my friend” recalls phrases from the Act 2 love duet of Tristan . · Beyond surface similarities,...

AMS-NE Chapter Meeting Saturday, March 8, 2014 The Boston Conservatory Samantha Bassler, "John Dowland and Constructions of Melancholy as Disability in Early Modern England" In the past, scholars of early modern England considered John Dowland's lute songs as seventeenth-century examples of religious melancholy and the cult of melancholia. Recent scholarship on melancholy and music in early modern England argues that cultural thinking about melancholy evolved significantly throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, calling for a nuanced view of the relationship between early modern conceptions of melancholy and Dowland's lute songs. As Eubanks Winkler has shown, the early modern English conception of melancholy is complex; often intertwined with theories about madness, gender, and the supernatural. To navigate these complexities, I utilize disability studies and investigate melancholy as a narrative prosthesis in Dowland's lute songs, demonstrati...

AMS-NE Chapter Meeting Saturday, September 28, 2013 University of Massachusetts Amherst Erinn Knyt, " New Instruments, New Sounds, and New Musical Laws:   Ferruccio Busoni, Edgard Varèse, and the “Music of the Future”" The disparity between Edgard Varèse’s early European compositions, described in Romantic or Impressionistic terms by those who heard them, and his experimental American compositions has contributed to the widespread assumption that Varèse reinvented himself after encountering the sights and sounds of New York. When composers are named as sources of influence, Richard Strauss and Claude Debussy are most frequently mentioned. Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky sometimes follow. While these composers undoubtedly influenced Varèse, especially with regard to his harmonic choices and use of episodic structures, they did not provide models for more characteristic features of his experimental compositional style: rhythmic simultaneity, expansion of the tonal...