CWRU Musicology

11/03/2023

At next week's AMS/SMT annual meeting, CWRU musicology PhD student Suzanna Feldkamp will chair the "Early Sacred/Liturgical Musics and Digital Humanities: Skills and Resources" session, organized by the AMS Skills and Resources for Early Musics Study Group.

This round table discussion with hands-on activities addresses the following questions: How do digital tools inform us about the formation and circulation of sacred musics and their sources (manuscript or otherwise)? What new tools are being created and what are the necessary skills, methods, and theoretical frameworks to implement them? What resources can be created and shared to help young scholars and students to approach research about sacred music? How can notions of representation and ability/disability be addressed at the interface between Digital Humanities and the research on sacred and liturgical music?

Learn more about the session and study group here: https://www.conftool.pro/denver2023-ams-smt/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=800

11/03/2023

Please join us on Friday, September 29, at 4:00 PM (Eastern) for the CWRU Music: Colloquium Series. Marysol Quevedo (Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Frost School of Music/University of Miami) will present a talk entitled "Sisters of the Clear Waters": Afro-Diasporic Womanhood in Tania León's "Oh Yemanja."

This talk will take place on campus in the Harkness Classroom. For more about the series, please visit https://case.edu/.../news-events/music-colloquium-series

CWRU Musicology

11/02/2023

At next week's AMS/SMT annual meeting, CWRU Musicology PhD candidate Samuel T. Nemeth will present a paper entitled "Orchestrational Absorption, Traumatic Rehearing, and the Gothic Specters of Berlioz’s Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale" as part of the panel on 19th-Century Orchestration, Genre, and Form." Read more about his work below:

The largely unintelligible outdoor premiere of Hector Berlioz’s Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale sparked revisions, reorchestrations, and amplifications by the composer. The work, intended to honor the fallen combatants of the July Revolution, was originally scored for military wind ensemble. Several of Berlioz’s orchestrational choices, such as tam-tam, recall music from French festivals and funerals of the early 1790s. After the work’s premiere, Berlioz augmented the military band with string orchestra and choir, instrumental combinations that have intrigued scholars. Peter Bloom referred to the work’s original woodwinds and brass as “uncanny,” and Inge van Rij has suggested that Berlioz’s revisions give the piece an “uneasy” quality that subverts its original ceremonial affect.
Such language requires further examination. I suggest that Berlioz’s orchestrations point to the Symphonie funèbre’s eerily familiar and unfamiliar nature, a Freudian, Gothic “return” of the soundworld of the Reign of Terror. Freud’s definition of the uncanny as a long-ago, frightening experience that was repressed, yet hauntingly resurfaces, is fulfilled by Berlioz’s original and revised instrumentations, which echo the soundworlds of the Revolution and of his early studies. As I argue, the reorchestrated Symphonie funèbre closely resembles Berlioz’s teacher Le Sueur’s own Chant de premier vendémiaire (1800), scored for four orchestras, four choirs, and organ. Berlioz’s recalling of Le Sueur’s piece was not a simple matter of homage, but instead showcases his fixation on the ideals of commemorative works from the Revolutionary era and on the sonification of heroism and grandeur. In particular, Berlioz attempts to reckon with the violent legacies of Revolutionary and Napoleonic ideals through his orchestrational revisions, just as survivors of trauma, Cathy Caruth suggests, often feel compelled to return to the source of their trauma in order to confront it. Berlioz, following that pattern, revisits the sonic specters of earlier soundworlds to try and overcome them. But his massed performing forces create further sonic distress; they embody J. Martin Daughtry’s concept of “belliphonic,” wartime sound and produce, to borrow Carmel Raz’s term, the “neural sublime,” moments of overload—sensory, emotional, conceptual—that lead to cognitive or physical meltdown.

11/01/2023

The American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory will hold their annual joint meeting in Denver next week, Nov. 9-12. CWRU Musicology candidate Marcelo Rebuffi will present a paper entitled "Waters on Fire: Post-War Trauma, Disability, and Multi-Narrative Strategies in Prog Rock." Read more about his work below:

April 2023 marks the 40th anniversary of the release of The Final Cut, the last album by Pink Floyd with Roger Waters as composer and singer. Waters, whose father died on the battlefield in WWII, was deeply affected when his country entered the Falklands War in 1982. Unsurprisingly, the album deals with post-war trauma; in fact, he had explored mental disability in previous works. From a broader perspective, Joseph Straus has argued that 20th-century music frequently performs disabilities as alternatives to the normative/normalizing narratives of overcoming. But The Final Cut represents a step further by using these elements strategically to tell stories from divergent perspectives that unfold simultaneously, leading to complex multi-narrative configurations.

In my paper, I will examine the songs “When the Tigers Broke Free” and “Southampton Dock.” The two tracks are structured in a similar way: a major-mode harmonic progression repeats four times. In the first three statements, these harmonic backgrounds operate in tandem with male voices in the low register, while in the last ones, Waters sings in the upper range producing a deliberately broken sound that contrasts radically with the other voices. Indeed, these fourth statements add an otherwise hidden perspective to the songs by revealing and unleashing the so-far repressed mental disability caused by war. While the first three statements of the tracks project a carefully crafted (in fact hypocritical) stoicism, the inclusion of non-normative voices uncovers the horrifying traumatic post-war consequences that the other elements of the soundscape silence, thus generating powerful affective dissonances. I argue that analyzing The Final Cut could help us to delve into the neglected centrality of disability in multi-narrative music, at the same time that it could also allow us to rethink some of its many ramifications in our current era when war has re-emerged worldwide.

10/31/2023

The American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory will hold their annual joint meeting in Denver next week, Nov. 9-12. AMS President and CWRU Professor of Musicology Georgia Cowart shares her perspective on what it takes to coordinate the event each year:

How do you prepare for the AMS/SMT conference?

This coming week I'll be meeting with the five presidents of our music Societies (AMS, SMT, SEM, CMS and SAM) about conference issues, including security for sessions that might inflame political tensions. Right now I'm finalizing committee appointments and preparing reports, introductions, and short speeches for the President's Plenary and for receptions honoring past AMS officers, our major donors, and our newcomers. I'm also preparing to host our large Business Meeting and Awards Ceremony, as well as a 3-hour Board of Directors meeting. I just looked at my conference schedule and realized that almost all my meal times were booked solid with meetings and events. I'm certainly going to try to get to our annual Case reception, to spend some time with former students and hear our students' papers, and I'm looking forward to dropping in at the end of Chris Jenkins' pre-conference.

What does your leadership role as president entail?

I don't have the responsibility of planning or executing the logistics of the meeting; fortunately, the vice president and the AMS Office are in charge of that. I'd say my main role is to serve as host, not only of individual events, but also (with Michael Buchler, the president of SMT) for the conference as a whole. This means that to the extent we are able, we create a safe and comfortable atmosphere where old-timers and newcomers--as well as everyone in between--can feel welcomed and valued. That is hard to do with so many attendees, but one thing I try to save time for is meeting as many members as I can, finding out what their interests are and how they feel about our Society.

What do you most look forward to at the conference each year?

Of course, it is fun to see old friends and colleagues, and I always look forward to learning more about my field. But after so many years in this Society, and so many years of serving on committees, as a director and as an officer, the thing I enjoy most is seeing new faces and feeling the enthusiasm of so many different kinds of people for so many different kinds of music.

10/26/2023

Please join us on Friday, October 27, at 4:00 PM EST for the CWRU Music: Colloquium Series. Sarah Long (Associate Professor of Musicology at Michigan State University) will be presenting a talk entitled "Music Composition in the Late-Medieval Lille."

This talk will take place in the Harkness Chapel, Classroom. For more about the series, please visit https://case.edu/artsci/music/news-events/music-colloquium-series.

CWRU Musicology

10/26/2023

PhD candidate in Musicology Samuel T. Nemeth recently gave a colloquium talk for the Pennsylvania State University Musicology and Music Theory Program. Nemeth’s presentation, “Battle of the Bands: Adolphe Sax’s Sonic Fusillades and the Military Politics of Timbral Homogeneity,” examined the Belgian inventor Adolphe Sax’s brass instrument inventions and their connection to French artillery and long-barreled fi****ms of the 1840s and 1850s. As
Nemeth suggests, Sax’s instruments provided audibility outdoors, high volume levels, and timbral homogeneity, delivering a massed core of sound—a tight grouping of “musical bullets”—with a high degree of accuracy.

10/10/2023

Please join us on Friday, October 13, at 4:00 PM (Eastern) for this week's installment in the CWRU Music: Colloquium Series. Tammy Kernodle (Distinguished Professor of Music at Miami University) will be presenting a talk entitled "You Can't Tell It Like I Can: Mary Lou Williams and the Re-Visioning of Jazz's History."

This talk will take place on campus, in the Harkness Classroom. For more about the series, please visit https://case.edu/artsci/music/news-events/music-colloquium-series.

CWRU Musicology

10/05/2023

Please join us on Friday, September 22, at 4:00 PM (Eastern) for the CWRU Music: Colloquium Series. Our affiliate, Aviva Rothman, Associate Professor of History (CWRU), will present a talk entitled "A Brief History of Cosmic Harmony."

This talk will take place on campus in the Harkness Classroom. For more about the series, please visit https://case.edu/.../news-events/music-colloquium-series

CWRU Musicology
CWRU Department of History

11/01/2022

Looking forward to presenting this research, based on the papers I gave in Italy, and the basis for my third dissertation chapter! Hope to see some of you there tomorrow! 🤘🏼

“Battle of the Bands: Instruments, Mechanical Cultures, and Sonic Metaphors of Nineteenth-Century French Empire”

The Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities will host a Graduate Work-in-Progress lecture with Samuel Nemeth, PhD candidate in the Department of Music, Tuesday, Nov. 1, from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. in Clark Hall, Room 206. Nemeth will present “Battle of the Bands: Instruments, Mechanical Cultures, and Sonic Metaphors of Nineteenth-Century French Empire.”

Register to attend the talk: https://case.edu/artsci/bakernord/events/graduate-work-progress-battle-bands-instruments-mechanical-cultures-and-sonic-metaphors-nineteenth-century-french-empire

In his talk, Nemeth will examine an 1845 Parisian military music performance contest—a “Battle of the Bands”—and how the Belgian inventor Adolphe Sax’s “victory” in the contest highlighted his novel brass instruments, the Saxhorns. New machines, including musical instruments such as the Saxhorns, lay at the intersection between 19th-century French musical and technological cultures, where new inventions generated tension between human and machine, nature and mechanism. Additionally, the collectivity and mobility inherent in Sax’s ensemble served as a sonic metaphor of France’s colonial ambitions.

A reception will be held at 4:15 p.m.

CWRU Musicology