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Dissertations in Progress
Kevin
Bartig
Composing for the Red Screen:
The Film Scores of Sergei Prokofiev
(under the direction of Annegret Fauser)
Sergei Prokofiev's film scores are unique among music composed for the cinema in having attained a notable popularity in concert halls across the world. Prokofiev accomplished this feat, moreover, while working in the complicated and oppressive artistic milieu of Stalinist Russia. Prokofiev's film scores were tremendously influential on subsequent generations of film composers, effectively shaping one of the twentieth century's most prominent and public art forms. Such confluence of continued performance, musical influence and politico-musical interaction is rare in the history of twentieth-century music.
Prokofiev composed music for eight movies between 1932 and 1946, from the well-known Aleksander Nevsky and Lieutenant Kije to more obscure propaganda films such as "The Partisans" in the Ukranian Steppe and Tonya. Discussion of the composer's work with film music, including the celebrated collaboration of Prokofiev and director Sergei Eisenstein, has remained remarkably absent from musicological literature. My dissertation explores the film music as a series of composer-director collaborations, each involving different technical problems and aesthetic goals.
Prokofiev's film scores furthermore provide a window into the politics of musical life in the Soviet Union of the 1930s and 1940s. Prokofiev's decision to return to the socialist fold at the exact moment Stalinism had reached a frenzied level fundamentally shaped his work as a composer of film music. This dissertation will draw upon a host of newly declassified archival materials housed in Moscow that will help to clarify and reinterpret the ways in which Prokofiev's music was tied to and shaped by the Soviet regime.
Kimberly Francis
Mediating Modern Music: Nadia Boulanger Constructs Igor
Stravinsky
(under the direction of Annegret Fauser)
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.
Robert Joe Gennaro
The Genesis and Reception of Robert Schumann's
Kerner Liederreihe, Op. 35
(under the direction of Jon Finson)
Robert Schumann's Zwölf Gedichte von Justinus Kerner: Eine Liederreihe, Op. 35 (1840), represents one of the composer's most interesting contributions to the Wanderlieder tradition. While comprehensive studies have been done for several of Schumann's song cycles, op. 35 has received scant attention from musicologists. One reason for this, according to Barbara Turchin, is that op. 35 has been misrepresented with regard to its poetic theme and musical substance. The Kerner Lieder seem to lack the kind of continuous narrative specific to Dichterliebe and Frauenliebe und leben. But there may be more important questions surrounding op. 35 than tightly-knit narrative.
My doctoral dissertation will focus on the Kerner Liederreihe from its genesis through its critical reception, placing it in the context of nineteenth-century romantic sentimentality. I will trace the process by which Schumann composed these songs from his selection of poetry, to the chronology of their composition, their realization in manuscript fair copy, and their appearance in print. Due to the fact that there are no known sketches for op. 35, I will compare the layers of the fair copy in order to study the manner in which Schumann proceeded. The final two chapters will examine the publication of op. 35, noting the way in which Schumann divided the cycle into two volumes and tracing its reception history.
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.
Irina Iliescu
Setting in Motion the Machinery of Awe: Hoffmann’s Beethoven and the
Transformation of Music Criticism
(Under the direction of Mark Evan Bonds)
E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1810 review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony has long been recognized as a landmark in the history of music criticism. Yet the reasons behind the enormous resonance of this review have never been adequately examined. How is it that a single review in a music journal of limited circulation – the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung of Leipzig – could have found such an immediately receptive audience throughout German-speaking lands and later in England and France as well? The answer lies in Hoffmann’s ability to integrate into his review concepts from early Romantic aesthetics and philosophy. His educated audience was already in a position to recognize and understand his metaphorical language and appreciate, at the same time, the individual style of a gifted writer. Hoffmann’s approach, moreover, was most widely disseminated not in its original form — in the review of 1810 — but in the guise of a fictional narrative that reached a far wider audience. Hoffmann recast the review in 1813 by incorporating modified portions of it into Kreisleriana, which in turn is part of a collection of essays entitled Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier. The two versions of Hoffmann’s critique of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony are often conflated, yet they are in fact quite different in crucial respects. The purpose of my dissertation is to treat the 1810 review and the 1813 essay as generically different yet complementary pieces, and trace the role they both played in transforming the discourse in early nineteenth-century music criticism.
Peter
Lamothe
Incidental Music in France, 1864-1914
(under the direction of Annegret Fauser)
Incidental music (music which accompanies spoken drama) formed one of the most important and widely influential genres to which a composer could contribute at the turn of the twentieth century in France. It was a regular part of the dramatic experience at the Comédie-Française and the Théâtre de l'Odéon, written by such leading figures as Georges Bizet, Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, Jules Massenet, Camille Saint-Saëns, and countless others. Moreover, incidental music played a crucial role in establishing the reputations of these highly influential composers. In later years, incidental music fed directly into the nascent art of film music. Yet in spite of the many overtures, entr'actes, melodramas and divertissements residing in various archives and libraries in Paris, no study has offered more than a fleeting glimpse into this fascinating and significant body of music. Theater historians have neglected it in part because of their lack of training in musical studies, while musicologists have neglected the study of incidental music in favor of opera. A study of the role of music in Parisian theatrical life would shed light on the history of drama and contribute to the cultural history of France, in which the theater plays so large a role.
In my dissertation I will establish the critical framework for assessing incidental music in Parisian theaters from 1864 to 1914, and begin to survey this repertoire. Because it would be impossible and even counterproductive to address each of the numerous works in detail, the dissertation will include several case studies as a means to present examples of trends seen in the larger context of staged Parisian music. These case studies will include at least one example of an institutional history ("Music at the Comédie-Française under the Directorship of Paul Porel, 1884-1892") and one analysis of an important production ("The Revival of Alphonse Daudet and Georges Bizet's L'arlésienne at the Théâtre de l'Odéon, 5 May 1885"). Other case studies will include a survey of incidental music in Paris during the year 1911 (the year of Debussy's Le martyre de Saint-Sébastien), and the impact of incidental compositions on the career of Jules Massenet.
Virginia Christy Lamothe
The Theater of Piety: Sacred Operas for the Barberini family in
Rome (1631-1643)
(under the direction of Tim Carter)
In a time of religious war, plague, and reformation, Pope Urban VIII and his cardinal-nephews Antonio and Francesco Barberini sought to establish the authority of the Catholic church by inspiring audiences of Rome with visions of the heroic deeds of saints. One way in which they did this was by commissioning operas based on the lives of saints from poet, and later Pope Clement IX, Giulio Rospigliosi and papal musicians Stefano Landi and Virgilio Mazzocchi. Aside from the merit of providing an in-depth look at four of these little known works, Il Sant’Alessio (1632, 1634), I Santi Didimo e Teodora (1635), Il San Bonifatio (1638), and Il Sant’Eustachio (1643), this dissertation will also discuss how these operas reveal changing ideas of faith, civic pride, death and salvation, education, and the role of women during the first half of the seventeenth century. The analysis of the music and drama will stem from paleographic studies of the surviving manuscript scores, libretti, payment records and letters about the first performances. I will provide a discussion of the religious culture in which these operas took place by examining other contemporary primary sources such as sermons, histories of saints lives, spiritual exercises, Jesuit school plays, books of manners and social decorum, and accounts of festivals held in Rome during the papacy of pope Urban VIII.
Ethan
Lechner
Cases of Intentional Hybridity in Twentieth-Century Composition
(under the direction of Sarah Weiss)
Of the many musical systems that humans have invented, not one is a "universal language." Not one can be meaningful to all people in the same way. A musical idiom may belong to diverse audiences, but, as an aspect of culture, the meanings its listeners draw from it (and attach to it) will vary with their own cultural situations. And, extending the analogy with language further, it is likely that to a totally uninitiated audience a new musical idiom will be meaningless, as would the words of an unfamiliar tongue. Any understanding that such an audience could possess would be purely its own.
There are a number of compositions in twentieth-century repertoire in which two musical languages are intoned simultaneously, creating a bridge between systems. In such cases, two meanings of different origins may emanate from a single musical figuration, and the listener is confronted with two interpretations of the presented figuration, one from a familiar context and one that is foreign. The foreign now becomes embraced in familiarity, while the familiar takes on the air of the exotic. I call such a dual idiom a cultural pivot, because it facilitates a shift between cultural systems at a single point. Such idioms might also be called "double-voiced," much in the way that Mikhael Bakhtin speaks of the confluence of two social languages (verbal) in a single utterance, a technique he observes used by certain novelists.
This dissertation examines intentional hybridity between Western and Asian musics. My questions are: How have composers of the twentieth century negotiated extremely dissimilar musical understandings from East and West and to what ends have they done so? I ask this of hybrid works from America , Japan , and Indonesia , in which a polyphony of cultural voices is pointedly apparent. These works offer guided comparisons of two musical styles, allowing the listener to explore otherwise alienating noise as familiar utterance. Beginning with Colin McPhee's Tabuh-tabuhan, a fantasy on Balinese idioms that the composer collected while living on the island during the 1930s, I illustrate how the cultural pivot can be observed at every level of a work, from thematic idea to ideology. In other chapters I discuss hybrid pieces by Toru Takemitsu, who explored relationships between the aesthetics of Western modernism and traditional Japan; Lou Harrison, who through study of Javanese and Korean music sought forms of universal expression; as well as several Indonesian composers at work today. These hybrids in many ways are attempts to heal the anxieties of the "modern" and "traditional" fragments of the composers' identities.
There is perhaps no better tool for addressing the confluence of anti-conventional musics called modernism than hybridity. Musical boundaries expanded and exploded throughout the twentieth century. New aesthetics arose rapidly, increasingly in attempted interlock with discourses ever more distant from the old ideological center of Western composition: the "popular," the "primitive," the "mystical," the "impenetrable." As modernism spread from its origins in a Europe curious about non-Western cultures and alternative modes of consciousness to a phenomenon with global resonances, the modes of modernist expression became increasingly shot-through with musicalities from various ends of the colonial/postcolonial experience.
Alicia
Levin
Seducing Paris: Piano Virtuosos and Artistic Identity, 1820-48
(under the direction of Annegret Fauser)
Cultural, musical, and even erotic icons of the 1830s, pianists such as Liszt and Frédéric Chopin ignited Parisian audiences with their spectacular virtuosity, physical appearance, and flamboyant showmanship. Their audiences responded with a fanatical devotion like that lavished on modern-day celebrities, who owe their charismatic personae in some measure to the cultural paths blazed by these early Parisian idols of the keyboard. Indeed, from the period of Liszt’s sojourn in Paris (1824-48) emerged influential attitudes and practices that shaped nineteenth- and twentieth-century musical life the world over.
In the early 1820s, virtuoso musicians flocked to Paris to establish their careers and their fortunes, directing their attention to the variegated audiences that populated public concert halls. Pianists in particular began to craft their public images with the same care that they lavished on their art, self-consciously engaging with audience tastes, social context, and intellectual and musical ideals to project images that appealed to the audiences of musical Paris. The virtuosity of these musicians extended beyond the keyboard into social, practical, and ideological realms, and their activities influenced more than the immediate reception of their music: their larger-than-life exploits also shaped subsequent accounts of music history. In my dissertation, I will examine how virtuosos, particularly Liszt, Chopin, and Marie Pleyel (the “female Liszt”), constructed their identities and launched their careers in Paris. Drawing on a rich body of primary sources, including journalistic accounts, personal papers, iconography, and archives records from concert halls and piano manufacturers, I will investigate largely uncharted issues of concert life, gender, nationalism, and aesthetics in Parisian musical life.
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.
Marc
Medwin
Listening in Double Time: Temporal Disunity and Resultant Form in the
Music of John Coltrane 1965-1967
(under the direction of John Covach)
The music of John Coltrane’s last group—his 1965-67 quintet—has been misrepresented, ignored and reviled, primarily because it is a music built on dichotomy. Scholars and critics have thus far attempted to approach all elements in this music comparatively, as is customary regarding more conventional jazz structures. This approach is incomplete and misleading, given the music’s conceptual underpinnings.
Using Coltrane’s own observations concerning this music, temporal perception theory and several performers’ perspectives on formal procedures in mid 1960s improvised music, all filtered through my experience as a listener and musician, this dissertation presents an analysis and contextualization of the symbiotically related temporal and formal polarities that guide Coltrane’s 1965-67 works. The present study treats, separately, solos of the period as well as temporal and formal complexities in Coltrane’s deployment and expansion of a jazz rhythm section; an investigation is then made, based on new historical research, into the manifestation of similar but hitherto unexplored modes of expression in today’s jazz and rock avant-garde.
Michelle
Oswell
The Decline of the Printed Lute Song in the Seventeenth Century
(under the direction of John Nadas)
Since Peter Warlock edited the first editions 1920s, the flowering of the lute song has been considered one of the high periods of English music history. During a twenty-five year period from 1597 to 1622, almost thirty printed lute song books were published. Despite numerous academic studies of the more well-known composers John Dowland, Thomas Campion, Thomas Morley, and Alfonso Ferrabosco, we still know little of the reasons for the disappearance of the printed lute song. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the political, economic, and musical circumstances surrounding the decline of the lute song.
I will begin by discussing the history of scholarship on the lute song. Most scholars recognize a distinction in style between the earlier songs of John Dowland, a more lyric, melodic style, and that of younger composers such as Alfonso Ferrabosco, who wrote in a more declamatory, less melodic, style. I will also address the problems with existing explanations for the decline of the printed books in the 1620s to justify the need for a more detailed examination of the circumstances surrounding the music printing culture of the early 17th century.
The majority of this dissertation will focus on the two generations of English lute song book printers. The first generation, consisting of Thomas East, Peter Short, and John Windet, printed the most well-known composers and songs from this genre. Despite the fact that the second generation, printing music from ca. 1610-1625, printed far fewer books than their predecessors, they too are vital to understanding the decline of the lute song. By researching the political and economic situation in which they operated, I hope to proffer a more reasonable explanation for the disappearance of printed song books. This approach will examine not only the stylistic trends of which lute song composers were a part, but also the marketing patterns of music printers that appear to mimic the recognized shift from melodic to declamatory songs. Finally, I will take into account extant manuscripts that contain lute songs and tie the lute song publications into the broader picture of music printing in the early 17th century.
Douglas Shadle
Music of a More Perfect Union:
Constructions of National Identity in the American Symphony,
1820-1865
(under the direction of Evan Bonds)
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.