AMS-NE: New England Chapter of the AMS

AMS-NE Chapter Meeting Saturday, April 14, 2012 Mt. Holyoke College Monica Chieffo, "Maria’s Veils, Salome’s Machinery: The Dance Scene in Metropolis and Salome" Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) has been judged by critics and scholars as a hallmark in the history of cinema and as the site of contentious statements about modernity, such as the aestheticization of technology and overtly formulaic gender roles. At the center of this discourse is the figure of the female robot Maria. In his influential analysis of the film, Andreas Huyssen notes how the perspective of the camera lens coincides with the male gaze, suggesting that the robot is constructed and subsequently animated by male vision throughout the film narrative. The film’s five-minute dance sequence—wherein the robot Maria emerges from an ornate urn to dance for a room full of male dinner guests—is reduced therefore to an instance of male vision. Huyssen leaves out completely any discussion of the...

AMS-NE Chapter Meeting Saturday, February 4, 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology DOUBLE SESSIONS MORNING SESSION A (Killian Hall):   Part 1: Analysis and Interpretation of Classical Music Alex Ludwig, "Is Haydn Too Funny for Hepokoski and Darcy? Examining Haydn's Presence in H & D's Sonata Theory" In their massive book Elements of Sonata Theory , James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy on multiple occasions allude to –– or explicitly detail –– Joseph Haydn’s well-known proclivity towards the use of humor and wit. In doing so, they portray his compositional practice as falling outside of normal conventions, as in this discussion of recapitulatory material: “Thus Haydn provided his audience with a witty work cleverly suspended in the force fields of at least three formal categories (277).” At times, the reader can almost visualize Hepokoski and Darcy throwing their hands up in desperation at Haydn’s “startlingly original musical language (16)...

AMS-NE Chapter Meeting Saturday, October 1, 2011 Capital Community College Max DeCurtins, "Changing Contexts for Bach Reception in Israel" In February 1927, an all-Bach concert at Terra Santa College appeared in the performance series of the Jerusalem Musical Society. The program notes began: “Bach occupies in the musical world the same position as Moses in the religious. He established its Torah on which everything else was subsequently built.” This venerating prose, read by attendees at one of the earliest documented Bach performances in the future State of Israel, offers a glimpse into the beginnings of the reception of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music there. The language is nothing if not charged—with religious ideas as well as ideas of musical heritage. The conflation of the musical and the religious stems from the nineteenth-century German context from which many Zionist movements began. The program notes almost seem to proclaim the secure position...

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...

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...