AMS-NE: New England Chapter of the AMS

AMS-NE Spring Chapter Meeting Saturday, April 17, 2010 University of New Hampshire Feng-Shu Lee, "Contextualizing the “Götter Ende”: The Conclusion of the Ring in Relation to the Creation of the Cycle (1848-1852)" In the first four years of the Ring’s 26-year evolution, Wagner expanded the work from one single music drama to a tetralogy. During this process, he also revised its conclusion, gradually turning the happy ending in Siegfrieds Tod into a denouement, in which the gods’ downfall takes place. A new look at Wagner’s prose and verse drafts shows that the cyclic expansion and the creation of a new ending are closely interrelated and occupy a significant role in the gestation of the tetralogy. I will focus on three examples to illustrate this interrelation: the Norns’ scene, the Waltraute scene, and Siegfried’s meeting with the Rhine maidens. In the original version of these scenes, the idea of the "Götter Ende" was missing: the dramaturgical function of t...

AMS-NE Winter Chapter Meeting Saturday, February 6, 2010 Brandeis University Presenters and Abstracts (Archived) Jeremy Leong, "The Influence of Kant in Chinese Music Education under the Pre-Communist Regime" Is there a connection between German music scholarship and Chinese music education? On first glance, it may seem rather implausible. Yet, if one takes a closer look at the contribution of Cai Yuanpei, such an association may not sound so inconceivable after all. Despite his relative obscurity to the Anglophone world, Cai Yuanpei was among the most prominent figures during the Republican era (1911-49) in China.  In addition to being an outstanding educator, he also held key governmental and administrative positions as Minister of Education, Chancellor of Beijing University, and founding member of the music department at Beijing University and the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. His achievements were not confined to the boundary of China, as his influence was also...

AMS-NE Fall Chapter Meeting Saturday, October 3, 2009 University of Connecticut Presenters and Abstracts (Archived) Hilary Poriss, "Prima Donnas and the Performance of Altruism" If biographers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century prima donnas are to be believed, the ranks of famous divas were once filled with an abundance of philanthropists willing to donate huge sums to worthy causes. A comparison of their accounts, however, sheds doubt on this image, for the same story continually reappears: encountering a wretched pauper (typically an orphan or an old man), the diva instinctually recognizes their intense inner beauty, and in an emotional frenzy, hands them whatever is needed (money, clothes, and funds for housing and education). That variations of this narrative appeared regularly throughout biographies of Malibran, Lind, Pasta, and Grisi, as well as many others, indicates that there is far more to this story than meets the eye. In this study, ...