AMS-NE: New England Chapter of the AMS

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...

AMS-NE Fall Chapter Meeting September 28, 2013 Bezanson Recital Hall, Fine Arts Center University of Massachusetts Amherst 9:45-10:15 Refreshments and Registration Morning Session        10:15    Welcome 10:20    New Instruments, New Sounds, and New Musical Laws: Ferruccio Busoni, Edgard Varèse, and the “Music of the Future”         Erinn Knyt (University of Massachusetts Amherst) 11:00    The English Voyage of Pietrobono         Evan MacCarthy (College of the Holy Cross) 11:40     A Late Blossom: Torquato Tasso’s Lyric Poems and Neapolitan Madrigal Culture         Emiliano Ricciardi (University of Massachusetts Amherst) 12:20-2:00    Lunch Break 2:00-2:30      Business Meeting Afternoon Session 2:30      Masse...

**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...