Dissertations in Progress

Molly Breckling

 Kimberly Francis

  In 1925, French pedagogue, composer, performer, and conductor Nadia Boulanger proclaimed that no composer could provoke such profound thoughts and intense enthusiasms as Igor Stravinsky. Beginning in the twenties, Boulanger promoted the Russian expatriate unceasingly in her private teachings, her public lectures, and her press releases. And as the grande dame of the Conservatoire Américain, Boulanger held the power to introduce Stravinsky to the world in the early twentieth-century. In the Château de Fontainebleau just outside of Paris, she taught countless students the discipline necessary to understand the infinite beauty of music. In this milieu, Boulanger served as cultural mediator between the Russian master and her beloved students.

Beginning in 1928, Stravinsky sent his son, Soulima, to Boulanger for an education, and three years later began sending scores to her for approval. She was eventually trusted to conduct and perform premieres of Stravinsky’s music, and copy-edit his manuscripts. Yet, despite this key role, Boulanger’s voice has all but been erased from the literature. As a result, generalities, anecdotes, and rumors are all that account for the current scholarship about Stravinsky and Boulanger’s involvement. Drawing on newly available materials, my dissertation will offer, for the first time, a detailed and nuanced view of how these two figures existed in a symbiotic relationship that in turn shaped the larger course of twentieth-century music.

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William Gibbons

Eighteenth-Century Opera and the Construction of National Identity in France, 1875-1918
(under the direction of Annegret Fauser)

In the wake of the disastrous Franco-Prussian war, French musicians and audiences sought ways to reaffirm the greatness of their nation. One strategy was to look to the glories of the past as evidence of continued French superiority. In this dissertation, I will examine the role of eighteenth-century opera in constructing a compelling musical past. In particular, I will focus on three composers with vastly differing reception histories in France: Mozart, Gluck, and Rameau, all of whose works received attention both on and off the operatic stages of Paris during the time period of this study. The Austrian Mozart was a favorite throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, serving to present Paris as the cosmopolitan capital of civilization. By 1900, however, performances of his operas ground almost to a halt in favor of revivals of Gluck’s works, a composer who could be adopted by the French and made into a source of national pride. Rameau, finally, represented the apex of the purely French tragédie lyrique—an important dramatic genre for establishing a nationalistic rhetoric of music history, but one that also encountered difficulty in gaining popular success at the fin-de-siècle given its musical style. By tracing the critical and compositional reception surrounding these composers and the revivals of their works, I will offer a new look at how music of the past can be used to support narratives of national identity, as well as provide new insight into the French reception histories of three of the most influential composers of the eighteenth century.

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Laurie McManus

“The Rhetoric of Sexuality in German Music Criticism, 1848-1883”
(under the direction of Jon Finson)

 Beginning in the late 1840s, an aesthetic battle that factionalized composers, critics, and musicians, dominated German music criticism.  While the main rupture occurred in the early 1850s, when Richard Wagner and critic Franz Brendel began advocating a musical art that would incorporate the power of political persuasion, the debate expanded over the next thirty years to reflect diverse concerns about nationalism, religion, anti-Semitism, and sexuality.  Of these themes, nationalism and politics have received the most scholarly attention, while the rhetoric of sexuality pervading the discussion of music has gone largely unnoticed.

This thread of sexual rhetoric informed the discourse on counterpoint, opera, nationalism, and anti-Semitism.  It bears more investigation because it complicates the familiar dichotomy of masculine and feminine portrayed by some scholars as dominating musical values of the entire nineteenth century.  Contemporary newspapers, music journals, and other music texts suggest a rhetorical shift in the 1860s away from the masculine-feminine dichotomy toward the more general problem of sexual expression versus repression.  Those composers such as Wagner who argued for a more passionate musical expression opened the door for future generations to write music on sexual topics and to discuss music in similar terms.  My study will examine the relevance of this rhetorical shift to other musical discourses and situate it within the wider context of a culture in the midst of social and national transformation.

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Anna Ochs

Opera culture in late nineteenth-century Mexico City was a significant form of cultural expression that challenged, reinforced, and transformed ideas of national identity.  While genres from Europe, such as Italian opera, French opéra bouffe, and Spanish zarzuelas, furthered European influence on cultural tastes of Mexican audiences, a few composers and performers attempted to create a style that connected specifically to Mexican culture by drawing from Mexican history and indigenous cultures.  The opera scene therefore demonstrated the struggle in Mexican society between efforts to establish Mexico as a “cultured” nation modeled on Western European countries and those who sought to emphasize Mexico’s unique cultural attributes.  In order to examine how the dominant ideals of gender, race and nationality impacted people and works of various origins, of divergent racial backgrounds, and in different genres, I will focus on the Mexican opera composers Melesio Morales and Aniceto Ortega, their operas Ildegonda and Guatimotzín, Italian opera singer Angela Peralta, and zarzuela singer/dancer Amalia Gómez highlight particular issues, such as representation, and instances of cultural interaction.  The prevalent perspectives on race, gendered expectations, and the impact of European influences were inextricably linked in the Mexico City opera scene, and helped to determine which composers, performers, and individual works attained success in eyes of critics and audiences.  The ways in which these ideas emphasized differences between the genres of Italian opera, Spanish zarzuelas, and French opéra bouffe, as well inequalities among Mexican and European performers and composers reflected the ways in which existing notions of racial, national, and gendered identity tended to draw attention to the disparities in social and economic power within Mexican society as a whole.

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Allison Portnow

When Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity first entered the American consciousness in 1919, the press noted that they would “revolutionize the accepted fundamentals of physics,” overturning the structure of scientific thought from Aristotle through Newton and to the present.  This type of rhetoric made an impression on modernist composers working in America who were themselves struggling (often against the perceived weight of a century of European tonal expectations) to find a unique musical sound and fresh artistic ideology.  Composers and music writers like Dane Rudhyar, Edgard Varèse, Henry Cowell, Charles Seeger, and Joseph Schillinger incorporated the scientific language being used in the general presses into their own writings on music, echoing ideas of Einstein as cultural hero and relativity as an exemplar for how an abstract theory (like a philosophy of music) might have profound cultural importance. 

In this dissertation I explore the influence of Einstein’s theories of relativity on musical life in America between 1921 (the year of Einstein’s first visit to the States) and 1945 (the year the U.S. dropped the atom bomb, the development of which Einstein was heavily involved in).  In the first half of my dissertation I explore how Einstein and relativity served as nodes in the cultural discourse surrounding the conceptualization of modernism in America.  I also contextualize the music world’s response to Einstein in a discussion of scientific culture’s general impact on music during the first few decades of the twentieth century.  In the second half of my dissertation, I interrogate musical sources of many different genres including periodicals, philosophies of music, and musical scores and recordings for evidence of the influence of relativity on music.  This influence is examined within important topical constructs: space, time, and energy.  These concepts, important to musicians for centuries and now reshaped by Einstein’s theories, provide insight into how modernist musicians and music writers coped with and even thrived in the rapidly changing, scientifically-dominated cultural environment of the early twentieth century.

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Douglas Shadle

Mastodons, Santa Claus, Niagara Falls, and Hiawatha. Although these things may appear unrelated, they are all uniquely American, and each inspired one of the thirty or so American symphonies written before the Civil War. This dissertation explores these works and their contexts in order to shed new light on antebellum American culture and the development of Western music in the nineteenth century.

For many European listeners in the early nineteenth century, the symphony was a potent symbol of political values such as republicanism, national union, and cosmopolitanism, all of which stood in sharp contrast to the conditions of everyday living: class struggle, suppressed rights, and political disunion. In the United States, however, citizens often believed that their nation, a “more perfect union,” embodied the very values expressed symbolically in the symphony. American composers wished to capitalize on this difference with their own audiences by using the symphony to monumentalize “American” cultural traits.

Symphonies by six composers form the foundation of this study: Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781–1861), William Henry Fry (1813–1864), George F. Bristow (1825–1898), Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–1869), Robert Stoepel (1821–1887), and C. Jerome Hopkins (1836–1898). Although they all tended to express and monumentalize American culture, each composer approached the symphony with vastly different conceptions of how it should sound and what role it should play in the nation’s broader social context. This variety of styles and political connotations reveals an ideological complexity among the composers that mirrored the heterogeneity of the American Union. The notion of “America” was being contested in music, just as it was in politics. By placing the symphony at the service of American nationalism, these composers inaugurated a tradition of symphonic writing in the U.S. that continued well into the twentieth century.

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Karen Shadle

Victory for the Patriots in the Revolutionary War brought more than political independence; it also marked increasing efforts to mold a distinctive culture in many areas of American life, including music. Tunebooks provide a case in point. Those printed in New England during the 1770s and ‘80s were among the first to include large numbers of new compositions by Americans alongside British favorites. Accompanying this shift toward native composition is a shift in the functions and textual themes of the collections. The physical act of singing itself became a central pedagogical and aesthetic focus. Selected and newly-composed tunes drew heavily on Biblical texts that put forth singing as a means of praising God. This obsession with singing influenced a subgenre of more elaborate anthems that addressed techniques of vocal production and the mechanics of four-part polyphony. These tunes open a window onto broader aspects of New England culture in the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary periods. Not merely a means for making music, the singing voice became a powerful symbol, embodying many of the perceived virtues of Colonial life: the voice was universal, utilitarian, natural, God-given, free, portable, and easily honed through hard work. Institutions devoted to cultivating the voice, such as the singing school, underscored its religious and social significance. By examining these songs about singing and the social and religious environment that supported them, I offer a new understanding of American psalmody that demonstrates a remarkable self-reflexivity and illustrates the blurring of the didactic / aesthetic and sacred / secular lines typical of this time period.

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Jeffrey Wright