AMS-NE: New England Chapter of the AMS

LOCATION at Amherst College Center for Humanistic Inquiry (CHI) Robert Frost Library,  2nd floor 61 Quadrangle Amherst, MA 01002  The entrance to the Library is from Quadrangle Drive (south end of the building).  More info regarding parking HERE Details as to specifics (hall/rooms, parking) will be posted as they become available. Bios, photos, and abstracts are posted as available. -------------------- 9:45-10:15 Refreshments and Registration Morning Session 10:15 Welcome 10:20 From Poem to Dance via Music: Departures and Convergences in Jonathan Taylor’s Transfigured Night Nona Monahin (Mount Holyoke College) Richard Dehmel’s 1896 “Verklärte Nacht” (Transfigured Night), a poem centered on a crisis of confidence in a couple’s relationship, inspired composer Arnold Schoenberg’s string sextet of the same title (1899; arranged for string orchestra in 1917 and revised in 1943), which in turn inspired numerous choreographic versions. In this p...

Please note: Bios & Abstracts will be added as they become available. The meeting will take place in the Earle Recital Hall (Sage Hall , First Floor) at Smith College. Maps/Directions/Parking info are found under the Upcoming Meetings tab . ------------ 9:30-10:00 a.m.       Refreshments and Registration 10:00 a.m.           Welcome Morning Session: The Dynamic Canon   10:05 a.m.    
 "Surface and Depth": Beneath the Reception of Rudolph Reti's Thematic Process, A Mid-Century Interdisciplinary Theory of Music Eric Elder (Brandeis University) The place of Rudolph Reti’s 1951 book, The Thematic Process in Music , has been greatly understated in considerations of the history and development of current streams of musical thought. While frequently included in such outlines, the work’s long reception history, stretching from Vincent Persichetti (1951) and Alvin Bauman (1952) to Peter Ki...

What follows is a snapshot of the program for the joint meeting of the   AMS-NE  and the New England Conference of Music Theorists (NECMT), which includes registration times, papers, and receptions. The full can be found  here ). Many thanks to our two program committees and special gratitude goes to Michael Scott Cuthbert  for volunteering to help merge the schedules of our two societies and for his work on laying out the joint program. We are also very indebted to Emily Richmond Pollock and Elina Hamilton for their work regarding local arrangements at MIT.  Please note that the meeting will be held on Friday-Saturday, 8-9 April at MIT;  AMS-NE  papers will be heard on Saturday only, but everyone is invited and encouraged to attend the paper sessions and the informal dinner on Friday, to be held at the house of NECMT president, Suzie Clark (please note that this is a change of location).   We look forward to seeing you at the meeting! ...

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...