AMS-NE: New England Chapter of the AMS

Happy 2014! I'd like to extend New Year's greetings to members and friends of the AMS New England Chapter. Below, please find the Call For Papers for our Winter meeting on Saturday, March 8, 2014 at The Boston Conservatory . Upcoming Meetings I also wanted to mention that due to scheduling issues, our Winter meeting (March 8) and Spring meeting will be very close together. The Spring meeting will be May 3rd at Providence College (please see the Upcoming Meetings section at the foot of this blog). Hosting Regrettably, the Winter meeting conflicts with the national meeting of the Society for American Music . If you are a faculty member at a college or university in  New England, please consider hosting a meeting. The more hosts we have, the more flexibility we have in terms of picking dates for the meetings. Hosting requires providing a venue, morning and afternoon snacks,  and A/V equipment (and support). We've been very lucky to have scheduled venues between now an...

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...

Our hosts at U Mass Amherst recommend parking in Lot 62, which you can find in quadrant D-4 on this map: http://www.umass.edu/visitorsctr/downloads/map_2012.pdf Other campus maps and directions are available here: http://www.umass.edu/visitorsctr/campusmaps Looking forward to seeing you on Saturday!

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...

The Fall 2013 meeting of the New England Chapter of the American Musicological Society will be held on Saturday, 28 September 2013 at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA. The Program Committee invites proposals of up to 300 words for papers and roundtable sessions. Abstracts should be submitted by Wednesday, 31 July 2013 via email to jsholes@bu.edu or by mail to Jacquelyn Sholes, AMS-NE Program Chair, Department of Musicology & Ethnomusicology, School of Music, College of Fine Arts, Boston University, 855 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215. Presenters must be members of the American Musicological Society. Those who are not currently dues-paying members of the New England Chapter will be asked to kindly remit the modest Chapter dues ($10).

**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...

 In light of Northeastern University's cancellation of two campus events scheduled for tomorrow, as well as the ongoing shelter-in-place order and T shutdown, we are cancelling tomorrow's chapter meeting of the AMS-NE. I would like to thank Hilary Poriss and Matthew McDonald at Northeastern for their help and assistance in planning this meeting. I also send my regrets to our presenters, but we hope to find some way to ameliorate this situation in the Fall. Please stay tuned. And lastly, many thanks to the Program Committee and Chairperson Jacquelyn Sholes for putting together a wonderful program. This measure may be unnecessary, but I would rather play it safe, given the open-ended nature of the situation at present. Thank you all, and I look forward to seeing you at U Mass Amherst on September 28th, when hopefully we are back to more peaceful times here in Boston. Stay safe, Rebecca Marchand AMS-NE President