AMS-NE: New England Chapter of the AMS

AMS-NE Chapter Meeting Saturday, April 30, 2011 Providence College Molly McGlone, "Experimental Urban Musical Spaces: a case study of the Electric Circus in the late 1960s" Exploring the little-known history of the Electric Circus, a New York music and dance space in the late 1960s, this paper reveals the inherent contradictions in one social, economic, and musical environment as a case study for understanding the historic cultural geography of a Lower East Side music community.  The Electric Circus space was unique as a commercial endeavor that both restricted its clients to participating in an already formulated social structure—one involving hippies, yippies, children, composers and “beautiful people”—that at the same time gave them license to come into the “think tank” to take charge of their own social order.  Bringing together university-trained composers such as Morton Subotnick and multiracial rock groups such as The Chamber Brothers, the Electric Circus managem...

AMS-NE Winter Chapter Meeting Saturday, February 19, 2011 Wellesley College Erinn Knyt, "Ferruccio Busoni and the Absolute in Music: Nature, Form, and Idée" “Absolute music! What the lawgivers mean by this is perhaps remotest of all from the absolute in music.” With these enigmatic words, Ferruccio Busoni opened his second aphoristic essay in The Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music. Although he could be called an advocate of absolute music because of his frequent description of music as “absolute” and his discussion of music as consisting of pure tones found in the vibrating universe, Busoni nevertheless developed idiosyncratic theories about the term, its usage, and its ideal manifestation in Tonkunst that remain largely unexamined in scholarly literature. True, Carl Dahlhaus noted Busoni’s use of the concept to refer to music unconstrained by traditional forms, but this is merely one aspect of Busoni’s views, which also allowed for and included the visual and explicit ...

AMS-NE Fall Chapter Meeting Saturday, October 2, 2010 Amherst College Yu Jueng Dahn, "'Virgin Soil' for Bach's Music: The American Reception of Robert Franz"  In 1867 John Sullivan Dwight asserted in Dwight’s Journal of Music that Robert Franz and J. S. Bach “have grown to be almost inseparable.” Criticized in Germany for his editorial emendations to Bach’s vocal works, which were considered historically inaccurate, Franz curiously found many supporters in the United States as early as 1855. This eventually led to benefit concerts in Boston in 1867 and 1872, to assist Franz financially because of his deafness. Dwight praised Franz’s editions of Bach’s vocal works as being “almost Bach-like in its spirit” and so true to the composer’s style that they could be considered “Bach’s having done it himself.” This paper traces Franz’s positive American reception as an editor and composer, examines his opinion of the United States as “virgin soil” for promoting qu...