9:00–10:30 New Approaches to Analyzing and Researching Nineteenth-Century Music
(Jonathan Kregor, Chair)
Douglas Shadle: “Programs for Program Music: A New Lens on Reception History”
The bulk of source material for nineteenth-century classical music reception history lies in a single core area: the periodical press. Daily and weekly newspapers, specialized music journals, and even magazines for a general readership often provided rich critical commentary on performances throughout Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere. Extant copies of these periodicals now create a vast, weblike repository of information that historians can use to trace shifting public discourses about musical culture, especially works themselves. As Leon Botstein has argued, however, the glut of available post-concert reviews can easily seduce us into constructing reception narratives that lack vital context, musical and otherwise. This paper demonstrates the value of integrating annotations from concert programs into reception narratives. As first points of public contact at specific events, they could—and did—frame post- concert responses with otherwise unclear motivations.
Although the connections between annotations and reviews can be traced across decades and styles, this paper focuses on the tendency of annotators to weigh in on an instrumental work’s “programmatic” elements. Commentary on extramusical narratives could be a useful point of entry for novice listeners in a concert context, particularly at a premiere. But it could also stoke press debates about the relative value of “program music” and “absolute music,” extending this controversy well past its midcentury height. Using three brief case studies sourced from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and New York Philharmonic digital archives—Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, Richard Strauss’s tone poems, and music affiliated with “Impressionism”—I show how the negative animus toward program music faded just as atonality and other experimental stylistic techniques came to occupy a discursive center in the early twentieth century.
Gilad Rabinovitch: “Towards a Lexicon of Early Nineteenth-Century Preluding”
It is well-known that concert life in the early nineteenth century involved a great deal of improvisation (Gooley 2018; cf. Czerny 1829). As Hamilton (2007) argues persuasively, echoes of these practices can be found in pieces like Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata. How can we listen afresh to such signals? While various sources discuss nineteenth-century improvisation in general (e.g., Bartoli & Roudet 2013; Lehner 2019; Feldhordt 2021) and preluding in particular (Goertzen 1996; Temperley 2009), there is a need for a systematic treatment of the lexicon of preluding. I follow Gjerdingen and Bourne’s (2015) proposal for tracking musical “constructions,” which draws on linguistic construction grammar (see Goldberg 2019 for an overview). Gjerdingen and Bourne examine pitch-gesture interactions, e.g., a specific signal that a performance was about to end. Preludes communicated to listeners that a composition was about to begin, setting the tone for it. Understanding their gestural and harmonic language reattunes us to traces of improvisation in pieces like Beethoven’s Tempest sonata (Hamilton 2007) and Liszt’s B-Minor sonata.
My work-in-progress report in this paper draws on preluding collections including Clementi (1787), Ries (1815), Cramer (1818), Czerny (1840 [1833]), and C. Schumann (2000 [1895]). Since some of these collections (e.g., those by Ries, Clementi, Cramer) enabled amateurs to perform pseudo improvisations that professionals were expected to play live, they give us sonic clues about what these practices might have sounded like. I survey harmonic resources (e.g., romantic Rule-of-the Octave variants) and typical successions of gestures (e.g., rising arpeggios punctuated by hesitant gestures and silences). Through this lexicon of typical pitch-gesture pairings, I argue that we can reframe notated traces of music making (i.e., scores and notations within performance treatises) not only as “composers’ compositions,” but also as traces of live music making beyond the score.
Janice Dickensheets: “Nineteenth-Century Musical Topoi and the Musical Tapestries of Middle Earth”
Topic theory has been slowly gaining acceptance as an analytical method of uncovering contextual meaning in music of the common practice period. However, film composers have long understood the power of musical topics and styles to convey extra-musical meanings. Nineteenth-century styles associated specifically with fascinations with the supernatural (demonic style and fairy music) and the ancient (chivalric, bardic, and heroic styles) have been particularly influential, especially in the genres of fantasy and sci-fi.
Howard Shore’s six Middle Earth scores are particularly fascinating when viewed through the lens of topic theory. While the numerous leitmotifs of the first trilogy are examined by Doug Adams in his 2010 publication, The Music of the Lord of the Rings, he does not discuss these themes in terms of nineteenth-century topoi, nor does he explore the ways in which those musical styles provide a virtual map to the culture and political structure of Middle Earth. Other scholarship likewise ignores the importance of topics within these musical scores.
Tolkien took great care to create entire histories for each race of Middle Earth, linking them through the various ages in a complex web of relationships. Shore builds upon this history with well-worn Romantic topoi and folk idioms, layering styles in such a way as to create complex symbolism, consequently gifting each race with a musical world that uniquely illustrates not only its own history, but also its inter-connections to the numerous other races of Middle Earth. From the simplicity of the Hobbit’s Shire Theme to the complex diversity of Elven and Human leitmotifs and multifaceted symbolisms in the music of Lothlorien and Mordor, Shore’s extensive layering of musical styles in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies results in a particularly effective musical tapestry through which audiences experience Middle Earth in all its complex beauty.
10:45–12:15 Mediating Gender and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Music (Jennifer Walker, Chair)
Eftychia Papanikolaou: “Mediating the Pan-Erotic: John Neumeier’s Choreomusical Translation of Mahler’s Third Symphony”
John Neumeier’s expansive choreographic output includes an unusually large number of ballets set to Mahler’s music. Among them, the Third Symphony of Gustav Mahler (1975) constitutes an early work that encapsulates Neumeier’s lifelong fascination with the composer’s works. The ballet’s massive scope offers a fascinating choreographic event, but not a specific narrative. As Neumeier explained, “The theme of my ballet is the music of Gustav Mahler. I have translated the feelings experienced and images suggested while hearing his Third Symphony into movement, into pure dance situations and into human relationships.”
Viewing this contemporary ballet, however, one cannot overlook that the work’s various modes interact to create meaning. Recent studies in choreomusicology have embraced multimodality as a central premise of dance-music relationships, and have affirmed the communicative fluency of all media involved. Following on the work of Stephanie Jordan, Helen Julia Minors and others, I analyze the interrelationships between music, movement, lights, costumes, and gesture to demonstrate that the ballet’s media work synergistically to construct, communicate and transfer a variety of meanings. Using the recorded performance of the work, I concentrate on how the ballet indexes recognizable images of Pan, whom Mahler famously invoked in one of his (later discarded) programs for the Symphony. I propose that, in Neumeier’s ballet, Pan takes center stage in a dual role: as a unifying character that appears in all six movements of the ballet, and as a manifestation of erotic energy. Although Mahler and his music have rarely been analyzed in these terms, I propose that Neumeier’s ballet functions as a “remediation” (to use a term from media studies)—it refashions Mahler’s Third though embodied choreographic practices that allow us to view it under the unexamined lens of the erotic.
Laurie McManus: “‘He’s Become a Part of Me’: Queering the Levi-Brahms Artistic Relationship”
The renaming of Karlsruhe’s Theaterplatz to Hermann-Levi-Platz in 2016 represents a period of renewed interest and appreciation for the nineteenth-century Jewish conductor Hermann Levi. Nonetheless, scholarship on Levi privileges his Jewishness and his support of Wagner (Gay, Dreyfus, Steil). Meanwhile in the Brahms literature, Levi’s prior relationship with the composer has received less attention than that of others such as Clara Schumann, Joseph Joachim, and Elisabeth von Herzogenberg. However, this relationship, which Karl Geiringer called “one of the most significant relationships of his [Brahms’s] artistic life,” deserves attention on its own merits—without the retrospective coloring of Levi’s later devotion to Wagner.
This paper reexamines Levi’s relationship with Brahms in the 1860s and offers a queer reading of the first song of Brahms’s Op. 32, the text penned by gay poet August Graf von Platen (1796–1835). In this period Levi, a theater conductor and amateur composer, helped Brahms with musical dramatic texted works and encouraged him to write an opera. Levi’s emotional investment in the relationship, preserved in letters to Brahms and friends, demands further analysis. Laurence Dreyfus has coyly noted “more than a passing moment of erotic attraction,” but we lack a serious investigation of this relationship considering recent developments in queer musicology. While Brahms’s perspective remains ambiguous, I argue that Levi struggled with romantic attraction to him. Levi’s letters to Clara Schumann indicate that he “lived so much in his [Brahms’s] thought and feeling that he’s become a part of me,” and that Op. 32/1, among other songs, held personal resonance for him with his identity struggles. Ultimately, this study expands interpretive possibilities of Brahms’s music while providing a more nuanced—and necessary—consideration of Levi.
Kendall Hatch Winter: “Becoming ‘Miss Grym’: Gender, Politics, and Suffragist Impersonation in Vaudeville and Music Halls”
Contralto Mrs. Howard Paul (née Isabella Hill) enjoyed a twenty-year career as half of a comedic double-act with her husband, whose name she used professionally even after their separation in 1877. The pair toured her native Great Britain, his native United States, as well as continental Europe to great acclaim. The Pauls specialized in impersonations and character work, and among Mrs. Paul’s late-career personas was the fictional women’s rights advocate, Miss Grym. The “lectures” Mrs. Paul gave as Miss Grym have not survived—and may well have been extemporized, besides. The sheet music for this character’s signature number, “Bother the Men!” (1869), however, is extant. Written by the Pauls’ frequent collaborator, Henry Walker, the song rehearses common, farcical stereotypes of reformed-minded women—the so-called “bluestockings.” With a rising refrain, pattering on a single note in the verse, and lyrics that present incomplete or irrational ideas, Walker’s music for Miss Grym engages several sonic qualities typically found in caricatures of women’s rights advocates—shrillness, stridency, garrulousness, and incoherence.
Straightforwardly misogynistic as the music is, Mrs. Paul’s embodiment of Miss Grym may have engaged in more nuanced gender play. According to published advertisements and performance reviews, Mrs. Paul’s particular specialty was male impersonation, and she was widely praised for her convincing portrayals of real singers: tenor Sims Reeves and Henry Russell, a baritone. Moreover, she periodically played Captain Macheath in The Beggar’s Opera and other trouser roles when not on tour. Using scholarship on cross-dressing in nineteenth-century American and British theater (Rodger, 2010 & 2018; Casey, 2015; and Raphaeli, 2019), I argue that Mrs. Paul’s Miss Grym was necessarily flexible—masculinized or femininized, transgressive or farcical—depending on the performance occasion and audience during what was a tumultuous era for the proposed expansion of women’s rights.
2:15–3:45 Sounding American? (Douglas Shadle, Chair)
Sarah Gerk: “Chauncey Olcott: The Voice of Gaelic Revival in the United States”
Chauncey Olcott (1858-1932) was older than most early recording artists, and his reputation for saccharine sentimentality seems to have made him understudied in comparison to other early recorded tenors including Enrico Caruso (1873-1921) and John McCormack (1884-1945). Olcott’s voice, however, is a unique source for understanding Irish-American values in the early twentieth century, amid a broadscale renewal of Irish cultural practices across Ireland and its diaspora known as the Gaelic Revival.
This paper contextualizes Olcott’s famously “pure” and “sweet” tenor voice within the goals of the Irish diaspora in the United States. During this time in Ireland, nationalists strategically encouraged the return of Irish cultural practices that had been lost during England’s long and brutal colonization of Ireland. Irish nationalists struggled at first to discern the best way to embrace the Gaelic Revival in music, as many traditional musicians resisted centralized organization that had boosted the Irish language and Irish sports. Instead, many in the United States and in Ireland worked to foster more classical music activity that reflected specifically Irish values. Understanding vocal production as both “entrained and perceived through racialized listening practices,” hearing Olcott builds understanding of how his audible sweetness and purity appealed to U.S.-based listeners as an Irish-American male singer, distinct from tenors of other origins, or those remaining in Ireland. 1 A review of reception reveals that U.S. society particularly valued his sound as refined, Irish, and U.S. American, introducing consumers to a newly elevated sound for Irish America.
Heather Platt: “From the Ivory Tower to Clubs and Schools: Exploring Diverse American Songs”
Song recitals and illustrated lectures presented to clubs and educational organizations played a vital role in educating Americans about their diverse song traditions. Programs that modelled this diversity by encompassing a range of different types of American songs began to emerge during the 1890s as a byproduct of rising American nationalism and the debates about what constituted American music. Although discussions about “American” folksong were given impetus by the publicity surrounding Dvořák’s New World Symphony (1893), the subsequent recitals and lectures were also influenced by the evolving field of ethnography, the publication of Harry T. Burleigh’s edition of spirituals, and the Indianist movement. Singers were particularly important to disseminating African American and Native American music to white audiences because during this era song recitals and public lectures were near rampant. While leading operatic stars gave recitals combining American songs with lieder, singers of somewhat lesser repute, including Nelda Hewitt Stevens and music critic Henry Krehbiel, both of whom collaborated with early ethnographers, presented programs exploring African American, creole, and Native American music as well as songs in the Anglo-American tradition, such as those by Foster. These types of presentations were considered to be both educational and entertaining and they were given in a variety of venues, including ones sponsored by women’s clubs and educational organizations such as Chautauqua, as well as schools. Studying these recitals, many of which now raise issues of authenticity and appropriation, fills out our knowledge of urban musical culture during the late 19th century and reveals how early ethnographic research and arguments about “American” music were disseminated to audiences beyond the major concert halls, to those who could not afford a ticket to hear the stars of opera, those who did not have access to orchestral works like Dvořák’s symphony, and those living in rural areas.
Jasmine Margalit: “American in Name, American in Character: Dvořák’s New World Symphony”
This paper explores the extent to which Dvořák’s ‘New World Symphony’ reflects the character of the USA at the time of its premiere. Since its debut at Carnegie Hall in 1893, Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor - “From the New World” has been canonized as a great piece of American music, shaping the development of America’s musical narrative. Often hailed as a truly ‘American’ work, Dvořák composed his ‘New World Symphony’ in an effort to establish a national musical character. Discussions regarding inspirations for the ‘New World Symphony’ have proved controversial, rising predominately from contradicting journalistic publications which reference varying inspirations including African American Spirituals, ethnomusicological transcriptions of Native American music and Romantic literature. This paper suggests that, whatever his compositional intentions may have been, in Dvořák’s attempts to create an original, American musical character in reflection of the unique land and people of America (Horowtiz, 2005), Dvořák instead encapsulates the nineteenth century character of colonial America. This is revealed by considering the predominant elements which shape a national character; physical landscapes, socio-political values and attitudes, and history.
Dvořák’s attempt to convey the prairie landscapes and great open plains of the ‘new world’ indulges in the Enlightenment notions of terra nulluis, undermining indigenous heritage. Dvořák’s romanticisation of indigenous peoples, his engagement with popular Romantic literary works and his public comments regarding African American Spirituals as foundation for his compositions, reflects Eurocentric, colonial values. Furthermore, Dvořák’s role as a European, emigrant composer and creator of the musical narrative, embodies the inescapable Eurocentric foundations of the US.
4:15–5:45 Women’s Musical Networks in the Nineteenth Century (Marie Sumner Lott, Chair)
Hilary Poriss: “Composing Community: Women’s Networks in Pauline Viardot’s Song Dedications”
Nothing in Pauline Viardot’s musical life conveys a sense of her literary breadth, musical acumen, and perhaps most interestingly, her vast social connections, than do her songs. As new manuscripts emerge, her song repertoire continues to expand, revealing an eclectic collection that spans multiple styles and languages—French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, and English—with texts drawn from poets as diverse as Lord Byron, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Théophile Gautier, Heinrich Heine, Dilia Helena, Alfred de Musset, and many others. Embedded in this catalogue, moreover, is a fascinating list of dedicatees, the majority of whom were women whose names and contributions have been largely lost. What can these dedications reveal about Viardot’s compositional approaches, choices of text, and commitment to the women who inspired her? And what, moreover, might these dedications divulge about the accomplishments of the women whose names are forever appended to Viardot’s songs?
Following a brief survey of Viardot’s song output, I delve into some of the most interesting dedications and dedicatees to find out what they can reveal about the music and conversely, what the music can reveal about the individuals. Viardot dedicated her song, “Liberté!” (1905) to Henriette Fuchs, singer, songwriter, and founder of the choral society Concordia, for example; and each of her Six mélodies (1892) acknowledges a different personality including Mathilde de Noguerias and Jeanne Lyon. As these and other examples will show, the dedications appended to Viardot’s songs form a rich, but largely hidden, tapestry of connections which, when uncovered, illuminate not only Viardot’s own artistic choices and social world, but also the broader landscape of nineteenth century women’s musical and cultural achievements.
Lauren Ganger: “Elizabeth Craven’s Brandenburgh Theater: Women and Creative Agency at the Turn of the 19th Century”
In 1798, the aristocratic British writer, composer, and amateur actress Elizabeth Craven (1750–1828) produced an original pastiche opera entitled The Princess of Georgia at Brandenburgh Theatre. Her second husband, the Margrave of Anspach, constructed this 300-seat theater as an addition to Brandenburgh House for her personal use, but it can hardly be considered a domestic space. While most studies of female music-making at the turn of the nineteenth century highlight accomplishment culture and assume that middle- and upper-class women almost exclusively performed music in the domestic sphere, musical women such as Craven are overlooked because they eschew this standard, binary model of feminine music-making. Craven’s musical activities at Brandenburgh Theatre demonstrate that women did participate in public performance while maintaining respectability.
I argue that Craven strategically deployed pastiche within the respectable confines of the feminine coded “private theatrical” genre as a subtle yet defiant assertion of women’s creative value. By setting her libretto to her own music alongside music by Italian masters, Craven ranked her compositions as equal to that of composers such as Paisiello and Gugliemli. Furthermore, in staging and performing her works in what I term a “demi-domestic” space, Craven avoided negative connotations of public musical performance and professionalism. Strategically making unconventional creative choices within the confines of conventional genres, Craven maintained the veneer of propriety while pushing the boundaries of her gender and class. Her musical activities in Brandenburgh Theatre demonstrate that Regency Era women could and did assert creative agency while maintaining their reputations.
Theodora Serbanescu-Martin: “Hélène de Montgeroult, Feminine Calisthenics, and the Culture of Digital Bildung”
This paper reframes the emergence of early nineteenth-century pianism via the interrelated literary, medical, aesthetic, and musical discourses of the time. In particular, it explores the contingency of pianistic culture on the presence, labor, and fashioning of women who practiced, performed, and composed music of intensifying difficulty. I begin situating this discussion on pianism by referencing early treatises and discourses surrounding physical education such as Rousseau, Basedow, Salzmann, which explain emerging ideologizations of the body, nature, and health that determined the development of pianism. I also explain how these ideas were further refined for the purposes of women’s education via treatises and literatures such as Maria Edgeworth’s Practical Education (1798), Mary Brunton’s Discipline (1814), and Antoine-Martin Bureaud-Riofrey’s Treatise on Physical Education: Specially Adapted to Young Ladies (1838), which all fussed over the conundrum of music’s physicality and its (in)appropriateness for women.
In the second part of my paper, I discuss pianist Hélène de Montgeroult, whose distinct popular legacy is limited to the story of her self-rescue mission in 1794, when her impassioned improvisation on “La Marseillaise” helped her to avoid execution by guillotine. I revive selections of the copious text and music from her 700-page Cours Complete pour l’Enseignement du Fortè Piano (1816), which I date, using new evidence, to precede Clementi’s Gradus at Parnassum (1817), and which, composed earlier between 1788 and 1812, I identify as the inspiration for, rather than homage to, her student J.B. Cramer’s Instructions for the Piano Forte (1812). Besides her music, I discuss de Montgeroult’s conception of the comfortable body at the piano, which I relate to emerging fashion of the time, including the empire waist (captured in de Montgeroult’s portrait), which — echoing the latest treatises on female education — meant to extend women’s bodily freedom. I suggest that de Montgeroult’s work occupies the threshold between feminine propriety and transgression at the keyboard.
9:00–10:00 Lecture Recital (Helena Kopchick Spencer, Moderator)
Whitney Thompson: “‘Poor Feminine Claribel with her Hundred Songs’: Ballads, Royalties, and the Birth of the Music Industry in 1860s England”
The Victorian composer Claribel, AKA Charlotte Alington Barnard, published over 100 songs during her ten-year career (1859-1869), mostly sentimental ballads. These songs were originally meant for domestic music-making, but over the 1860s, Claribel’s music became a cultural sensation. Each song sold thousands of copies, and they were regularly exchanged via women’s magazines like The Queen. They also appeared at ever-larger public concerts as the decade elapsed. The contralto Charlotte Sainton-Dolby, one of Claribel’s earliest and closest collaborators, performed Claribel’s
songs at her own concerts, at musical festivals in Worcester and Gloucester, and eventually at the “London Ballad Concerts,” which she and Claribel’s publisher John Boosey co-created. Across the Atlantic, Euphrosyne Parepa performed Claribel’s songs at the Bateman Concerts in New England, to rave newspaper reviews. With her success, however, came harsh media criticism. Henry Fothergill Chorley at The Athenaeum coined the pejorative “Claribel-ware” for the sentimental ballad genre in 1866, and The Orchestra regularly called Claribel’s music “trash.” Her legacy was hotly debated in the press after her death, with even the most favorable editorials damning her with faint praise. Today—for many reasons, including a dearth of recordings of her songs—she has largely faded from memory.
This lecture-recital will be both history and historiography. I will examine Claribel’s career and impact, but I will also trace the burial and re-excavation of her full story over the last 150 years, from W.B. Squire’s necessarily truncated entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, to her prior biographer Phyllis Smith’s herculean efforts to uncover more of her life, to the ways in which I (and others) have built on that work today. The lecture-recital format also hearkens back to Phyllis Smith and her collaborator Margaret Godsmark, who gave similar programs about Claribel’s life and music in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
10:15–12:15 (De)Constructing Racial Narratives in Nineteenth-Century Music
(Heather Platt, Chair)
Nathan Dougherty: “‘Nègres et blancs sont égaux à tes yeux’: Ourika in Three 1820s French Romances”
Claire de Duras’s Ourika (1823) was a sensation. As The Literary Magnet reported in 1824, “all Paris is ‘Ourika’ mad.” In the novel, a young Senegalese girl is raised by a white aristocratic woman. A growing awareness of racial prejudice makes her realize that she will never marry a white Frenchman because she is black, which leads to her death. Though its antiracist message has been called into question, Duras’s sympathetic black heroine nonetheless inspired an “Ourika mania,” according to Robin Mitchell, leading to new trends in fashion and myriad imitative novels, plays, and poems. Though often overlooked, Ourika also featured in a number of French romances.
In this paper, I draw attention to three Ourika romances published in the 1820s, exploring ways in which the salons songs by Amadée de Beauplan, Jérôme Joseph Momigny, and Alphonse Leduc complement and complicate the already ambiguous racial themes in Duras’s novel. In some ways, they betray anxieties, reaffirming the supposed impossibility of interracial marriage and of Ourika’s integration into French society. Yet, the romances also minimize racial difference. Unlike many of the Ourika plays performed in 1824, in which Ourika is musically othered by singing exotic “Creole airs,” in the romances, she sings in the same style as her white peers, thereby contesting contemporaneous stereotypes concerning black intellect, subjectivity, and musicality. Ultimately, I argue that these works belong to larger group of antiracist romances published in the 1820s, elucidating ways in which music participated in broader abolitionist debates, particularly in salons.
Patrick Murphy: “Black Middle-Class Contributions to Carnival Music in Late 19thc. Trinidad”
During the late-nineteenth century, Trinidad’s black middle-class began to see in Carnival a potent tool to magnify their political voice—a voice stifled by a domineering white elite. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, this middle-class articulated their desire for a more representative government, and imbued with a spirit of partial reform, they sought a modification of Crown Colony Government by way of limited elections. But the colonial authorities, reticent of the rise of black journalists; trade unions; and black business owners, gave no such heed. For the group, the black middle-class was to bear the role of standing between the white elite and the working-class; advocate for the indoctrination of the masses; and push for the erasure of folk customs. Although educated blacks and elite whites shared some sense of solidarity under the reigning Victorian customs of their times, the development of a unified identity was hindered by white mistrust, an exclusive and endogamous elite supportive of a stratified system and drawn to retaining their accumulated powers. In this setting, the black middle-class drew closer to the black working-class, intervening in political decisions that could be deemed elitist and harmful but which, also, could endanger popular Carnival. As the middle-class participated more and more in Carnival, they began to reexamine the season’s cultural heritage and, to magnify their voice and legitimize their rising position, transformed the cultural practice by encouraging supposed improvements to the season, fundamentally altering, in the process, Carnival’s music at large. This was done, specifically, by (1) showcasing Carnival music in English, (2) displaying music as part of well organized tents; (3) featuring singers accompanied by European instruments; (4) , investing in fancy bands; (5) supporting double-tone calypso form; and (6) discouraging female participation in music competitions.
Sam Girling: “Gracefulness or Raucousness? The Tambourine’s Surprising Role in Early 19thc. British Domestic Music”
In Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century, composers such as Daniel Steibelt, Muzio Clementi, and Joseph Dale began incorporating tambourine parts into keyboard compositions, typically waltzes and divertissements intended for domestic performance in Britain. These pieces held surprising pedagogical value, as evidenced by at least three tambourine instruction manuals from this period. The manuals introduce quasi-virtuosic techniques that underscore the tambourine’s association with dance and place a clear emphasis on the visual spectacle of these works.
This paper traces the tambourine’s evolution in the early nineteenth century from a mere prop representing female gracefulness in artwork to being treated as a serious part of a girl’s music education. Evidence suggests that tambourine instruction was provided by both female and male tutors, the latter often being musicians with ties to the British military. I argue that these pieces with tambourine parts served as a bridge between passive, recreational drawing-room music and more dynamic, social, and even slightly flirtatious activity. Works such as Steibelt’s La Retour du Zephyr for pianoforte, tambourine, and violin (c.1802) and Dale’s Grand Sonata for pianoforte, tambourine, flute, violin, and basso (c.1798) feature detailed choreographic instructions along with a range of playing techniques – including thumb rolls, bass notes, and harmonics – that were otherwise not widely adopted in percussion repertoire until the early twentieth century.
The tambourine in the early nineteenth century thus provided women with an avenue for self-expression that contrasted with the constraints of contemporary social etiquette. As such, these works reflect the growing momentum for gender reform championed by pioneering writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Catherine Macaulay in the wake of the French Revolution.
Kristen M. Turner: “The Plantation Show and Narratives of Racial Progress During the Gilded Age”
Most Americans in the late nineteenth century believed that society was in the process of evolving from the “savagery” of an agrarian past to an urban and “civilized” present. Versions of this narrative appear in songs, vaudeville acts, musical comedies, and other entertainments. Popular in the 1890s, plantation shows purported to trace the evolution of Black Americans from their (“savage”) roots in Africa through enslavement to (“civilized”) financial success at the end of the nineteenth century. They ranged from outdoor extravaganzas to three-act musical theater productions. Plantation shows featured an integrated cast but were usually written and always produced by white people. Enslavement was generally presented as a benign institution that protected otherwise naïve and violent slaves, and civilization was musically represented by interpolated classical music. Two scripts survive that were influenced by William McClain, an important Black comedian who was involved in the casting and performance of all but one plantation show. McClain was the star and stage director for Down on the Suwanee River (toured 1895–96), which was clearly modeled on his unproduced script, Before and After the War (copyright 1894). A comparison of the two scripts demonstrates the compromises Black creatives made to work in white-controlled spaces but also reveals that McClain destabilized some of the pernicious stereotypes and historical falsifications presented in other plantation shows. Drawing upon research on Social Darwinism, plantation shows, and the Lost Cause by Blight, Cox, Crook, Dingwall, and Leonard, and a close reading of surviving scripts and press reception of plantation shows, I argue that McClain and other Black entertainers resisted white narratives of racial progress through a more accurate depiction of enslavement and by sonically representing civilization with music that came out of Black communities rather than Western art music.
2:15–3:15 New Ways of Hearing Nineteenth-Century Music (Jack Blaszkiewicz, Chair)
Maurice Windleburn: “Echo and Rhythm in Henri Bergson’s Early Thought”
With the relatively recent ontological turn in sound studies, several theorists (including Christoph Cox, Douglas Kahn, Salomé Voegelin, and Steve Goodman) have privileged vibration as a ‘grounding’ or underlining basis of reality. Subsequently, this has led to a positioning of sound as the sense closest to ‘the real’. Generally, these sonic ontologies take phenomenology or the ideas of Gilles Deleuze as their theoretical foundations. Yet, several thinkers in fin-de-siècle Paris were already privileging sound among the senses, and music among the arts, because of their supposed proximity to reality’s vibratory core. This included figures as diverse as the psychologist Théodule Armand Ribot, the painter Paul Gauguin, and the occultist Edmond Bailly.
This paper outlines the role vibration, echo, and rhythm play in the philosopher Henri Bergson’s early metaphysical texts, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), and Matière et mémoire (1896). Critiquing the popular fin-de-siècle notion that external vibrations cause sense perceptions, Bergson developed a stranger, though still essentially vibratory ontology, where echoes rebound between perception and memory, and polyrhythms spawn from different organismic consciouses. Throughout this paper, Bergson’s ideas are compared to those of his contemporaries, especially Ribot, whose ideas regarding vibration and perception were more typical of the period. Additionally, my exegesis of Bergson’s vibrational ontology will be contrasted with recent appropriations of his thought in sound studies literature.
Kirill Smolkin: “Tchaikovsky, as Heard in Poulenc”
Francis Poulenc is known for his frequent musical borrowings, which established his reputation as a composer who “never penned an original note” (Rorem 2000) and yet who succeeded in developing an individual style. Although Tchaikovsky’s work was an essential reference point for Poulenc, the parallels between the two have barely been addressed by scholars. They would seem, however, to be deeper than what first meets the eye.
While Poulenc openly claims Tchaikovsky as his model, in Les Biches, references to The Sleeping Beauty manifest themselves indirectly. They are ambiguous, like everything in this work, and are imbued with “erotic tensions and gender ambivalence” (Moore 2012). Besides the general emotional pathos of the music, Poulenc may have shown interest in Tchaikovsky’s neoclassical experiments and the way in which he explored the issues of identity and otherness in a broader sense. I argue that another model for Les Biches could be the Interlude from The Queen of Spades, which also contains elements of mixing gender roles and balancing innocence and sexual desire.
In his Violin Sonata, Poulenc quotes a theme from Eugene Onegin, which may seem incongruous. Yet, as Smith (2016) notes, this act of combining the uncombinable reflects Poulenc’s “unique, surrealist perspective.” Indeed, Tchaikovsky’s themes function in Poulenc’s work like figures in the surrealists’ paintings: retaining their recognizable appearance, but situated in an unfamiliar context, they give the impression of fantastical visions. In this parallel reality, where Tchaikovsky’s music has been given a new meaning through Poulenc, time flows differently, and thus the already “long” nineteenth century is extended further.
This paper discusses how Tchaikovsky’s music was reinterpreted by Poulenc, focusing on Les Biches and the Violin Sonata. It proposes that we listen to Tchaikovsky through the perspective of Poulenc and possibly reconsider our concept of both composers.
3:45–5:15 Ownership, Publication, and Performance (Shaena B. Weitz, Chair)
Christopher Parton: “Who Owns a Song?: Copyrighting Foreign Music in 19th-Century Britain”
Lovers of Italian opera or German lieder in nineteenth-century Britain would have purchased the sheet music to their favorite pieces in English translation. This was a lucrative market for British publishers who were generally at liberty to republish music already published abroad before the 1886 Berne Convention. A popular export like Beethoven’s setting of Goethe’s “Kennst du das Land”, for example, was published by eight different London publishers between 1810 and 1875, with each providing a brand-new translation of Goethe’s Mignon Lied. Six of these publishers entered their edition at Stationer’s Hall, establishing a 28-year copyright over “Know’st thou the Land”. How was it that the same setting of Goethe could be legally owned by so many publishers simultaneously?
In this paper I propose that the ambiguous legal status of translations enabled the repeated copyrighting of foreign songs. As the courts deliberated on the rights of foreign authors and composers to their works over many decades, publishers could still claim translations as the copyrightable work of British authors. This encouraged the creation of new translations, while preventing the establishment of any one translation as authoritative. I will offer a historical overview of nineteenth-century music copyright in light of legal debates over the Lockaen, common law right versus the utilitarian, statutory right to intellectual property (Kretschmer and Kawohl, 1993/2004). The culture of song translation, I argue, relies on a utilitarian view of copyright, which privileges the intellectual life of the nation over author’s rights. Translation can therefore be seen as a form of “Englishing” (Wheelock, 1990): a way of assimilating the music of foreign composers as British property through the adaptation of English texts. This paper thus draws attention to the broader role of copyright in the global dissemination and use of vocal music in the nineteenth century.
Samuel Backer: “Locally Oriented but Nationally Circulating: Oliver Ditson Co. and the Political Economy of American Mass Culture”
Scholars of American music often identify the turn-of-the-twentieth-century emergence of Tin Pan Alley as the moment at which the nation’s industry began to operate at the scale—and with the efficiency—necessary to produce a form of commercial mass culture. Previously, it is argued, publishing was a poorly organized industry unable to develop a large-scale marketplace for its cultural goods. Pushing back against such depictions, this paper argues that the leading firms of 19th-century American music publishing were in fact quite successful in their pursuit of a different goal—a system of nationally organized yet locally oriented artistic production capable of generating substantial profits for decades.
Oliver Ditson Co., a Boston-based sheet music company at the center of a powerful consortium of music firms during the mid-19th century, offers a useful case study. As the company grew, absorbing the businesses (and engraved plates) of its rivals, it began to function at an increasingly expansive scale, selling products in communities throughout the nation. Despite this reach, the firm chose to operate through an array of intermediaries, culture brokers who instantiated national forms within local contexts. Initially stand-alone partners, these companies were eventually replaced by spin-off Ditson franchises—seemingly independent, yet actually tightly linked. These business practices reflected the cultural ideologies of the time. To its customers, the publishers acted as intermediaries for musical cosmopolitanism, providing access to the increasingly sacralized “high” culture of international refinement while localizing it within homegrown institutions. For managers, dispersing decision-making was a good fit for the localized, information-poor, and slow-moving cultural economy of the 19th century. Examining the interconnected networks of semi-independent companies that dominated this era, this paper develops a new analysis of the disaggregated structure of the American entertainment industry in the years prior to its industrial centralization.
Jonathan Kregor: “‘As Played By...’: The Performer as Editorial Endpoint”
In 1838, Franz Liszt and Henri-Louis-Stanislas Mortier de Fontaine performed Johann Peter Pixis’s Variations brillants sur un théme original, Op. 112, in Milan. The success of the concert led Simon Richault to republish the work that same year, “augmented with a cadenza by Liszt” (“augmentés du Point d’Orgue par Liszt”). By connecting concert repertoire to his musical catalogue, Richault deliberately foregrounded the performer in ways that ran counter to the growing historicist and pedagogical aims of the age. While Liszt’s fame may have helped popularize this practice, other musicians, such as Wilhelm Ernst and Hans von Bülow, also received similar editorial privilege during the nineteenth century.
These performer-centric editions stood apart from the two dominant editorial practices of the time. Source-critical editions sought to present music “as intended by” its composer, simultaneously revealing and fixing an authoritative reading that performers were expected to revere. In contrast, instructive editions followed an “as prescribed by” approach, in which contemporary teachers established precepts for how a work should sound, thereby shaping performance norms for the future. Performer-centric editions, however, offered a third approach: the “as played by” model. Rather than aspiring to historical authenticity or pedagogical instruction, these editions sought to capture the ephemeral artistry of a specific performer’s interpretation.
By relying on musical notation instead of textual commentary, performer-centric editions allowed audiences to recreate performances they might never have witnessed, bridging the gap between live performance and its preservation. Equally significant was the potential for players of “as played by” editions to become the virtuoso, bringing themselves closer to the performer and composer in ways unmatched by any other contemporary communicative medium.
5:30–6:30 Pedagogy in Practice (Laurie McManus, Chair)
Danny Huang: “The Cultural-Historical Contexts for Franz Liszt’s Weimar Masterclasses”
When Franz Liszt began giving masterclasses in Weimar in 1848, he established a pedagogical style that emphasized artistic communication over curricular rigor. The artistic milieu and institutionalization of Liszt’s early classes received few attentions, despite scholarly recognition of its didactic novelty. Current scholarship on Liszt’s early masterclasses has focused much more on his pedagogical practices, yet not as much on them as a part of his initiative to renew Weimar as “the Athens of the North.”
I trace the context of Liszt’s masterclasses in Weimar by surveying practices in cultural and musical education he experienced first-hand, prior to and since arriving in Weimar. These include the Paris and Weimar salons, conservatory cultures in Paris and Leipzig, Liszt’s idea of génie oblige, and the ubiquitous albeit nebulous notion of Bildung. I also compare Liszt’s studies with Czerny and his private instruction of Valerie Boissier in 1831-32 with his masterclass pedagogy, as revealed in Hans von Bülow’s letters in 1850-53, William Mason’s Memories of a Musical Life, Liszt’s essays on musician’s social roles and the Goethe foundation, and accounts by visitors to Liszt’s classes and gatherings like George Eliot.
My paper reevaluates Liszt’s unique relationship with his students that formed the so-called “Altenburg Eagles” and those cultural precedents in realizing his vision of a cultivated musician. The early classes differ from the later ones of 1869-86 in regard to the kinds of attention Liszt devoted personally to each student’s career and education. My cultural-historical investigation of Liszt’s masterclasses sheds new light on his reasons for giving them. In dialogue with his other Weimar projects and European Romantic thoughts in cultural education, Liszt realized through his “Altenburg Eagles” what it means to be a musician of the future, one well-versed in artistic knowledge beyond music and can apply it to their own craft.
Lucy Liu: “Close Reading and Aesthetic Experience in the Classroom: The Story of a Brahmsian Urlinie”
For the past half century, close reading and aesthetic experience1in music pedagogy have been challenged on two fronts: (1) formalist analytical practices that elevate theory above the particularities of individual artworks and, (2) in reaction, the new musicology has rightly “disenchanted” the autonomy of art music by contextualizing it within longstanding power structures. This is especially the case for the 19th-century canon. To be sure, there exists research from various traditions that does place “musicality” front and center, e.g., energeticist Schenkerian readings, dialogue-based performance & analysis treatises, and certain feminist, relational approaches. But the prevailing atmosphere is one of critique. This tone of skepticism discourages students from in-depth technical study, which affects one’s ability to learn any repertoire.
Thus, this paper offers a restorative: a demonstration of teaching tonal analysis (through a Schenkerian energeticist lens) in a way that foregrounds the physical and emotional components of musical exploration. The piece I have chosen is the Adagio of Brahms’s Second Symphony. Not only does its sui generis sonata form defy 19th-century formal-narrative conventions—often a good entrée into a piece for students—it also encodes an expression of physical-spatial gravity2 directly into its motives (whose contours conveniently resemble descending Urlinien). Specifically, motives at various levels encounter a Schoenbergian “tonal problem” that interrupts these linear progressions’ natural tendency to descend, thus preventing melodic fluency and mandating multiple motivic repetitions, often at high levels of voice leading. Altogether, this compositional problem results in a cataclysmic, tragic, and finally irresolute ending whose Essential Structural Closure is severely undermined.
By tracing the Urlinie’s (and local Urlinien’s) uncharacteristic behavior and the fraught psychological experience this may engender for listeners and analysts alike (especially in a lively discussion-based classroom), I hope to show students that art music is not reserved for experts, that anyone can access this repertoire.
9:00–10:30 Chopin, Then and Now (Jane Sylvester, Chair)
Jessica Castleberry: “Death Laughs Last: Chopin’s Scherzi and the Danse Macabre”
Frédéric Chopin’s scherzi are frustratingly difficult to parse. Although there is a general consensus that Chopin transformed the genre itself, the question of precisely how, or into what, or how the literal meaning of “joke” is relevant, is consistently avoided. Since they first appeared, writers have used such terms as disturbing, demonic, fantastical, portentous, ironic, scornful, even oneiric to describe them, but the inquiries tend to stop there. Topical analysis confirms these descriptors, identifying many constituent gestures as signifiers of the Macabre Style, the constellation of topics that evokes mortality: futile resistance to death; reluctant, grieving obedience to death’s dictates; eventual acceptance, and the promise of mercy and bliss.
The B♭ minor sonata, Op. 35, is surely Chopin’s most substantial essay in the Macabre Style, which makes its scherzo movement a natural starting point for an examination of Chopin’s conception of the genre. Stylistic analysis reveals a dense concentration of musical gestures shared with Ombra, Demonic Style, and Lullaby–– often signifiers of the Macabre topos. More specifically, the defining language of this work is rooted in the Danse Macabre, the medieval metaphor for confrontation with inexorable death, and a topic that became widely associated with the scherzo itself. In fusing these styles, Chopin paints a sonic memento mori that oscillates between the relentless pursuit of death as a final dance led by legions of reanimated corpses, and the oneiric, consolatory strains of a lullaby gently rocking its charges toward eternal sleep. Ultimately, in this sonata, the scherzo immediately followed by the most famous funeral march in the repertoire—symbolizes the final struggle in death’s grip. The numerous stylistic parallels with the other scherzi, then, strongly suggest that the scherzo genre itself, for the morbidly fearful Chopin, was an expression of the bitterest reality of the human condition: dust to dust.
Rachana Vajjhala: “Chopin’s Candelabra”
In Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra (2013), an aging Liberace seduces an unsuspecting new lover, the much younger Scott Thorson. Their relationship, however, hinges on more than sex. Throughout the film, Liberace extends his seduction to a kind of corporeal takeover, encouraging Thorson to undergo extensive plastic surgery to preserve youth—or more precisely, both of their youth, as the younger man gradually comes to resemble the older’s younger self. In this paper, I consider this slow-motion body snatching in the context of the film’s use of music. Liberace of course became famous as a pianist, concertizing with repertoire from classical to kitsch. Indeed, his ever-present candelabra came from a biopic about one of his favorite composers: Chopin. A Song to Remember (1945) concretizes and nationalizes Chopin’s physical decline for mid-century sociopolitical purposes. But, as Liszt once wrote, “his life, unconnected with public events, was like some fact which has never been incorporated in a material body.” I argue that Behind the Candelabra capitalizes on Chopin’s perceived ethereality, as represented by his music, in order to destabilize the status of the musicking body. Liberace, a kind of latter-day hybridization of Pygmalion and Narcissus, molds Thorson into himself from days past. For the performance scenes in the film, Soderbergh technologically affixed actor Michael Douglas’s head onto pianist Philip Fortenberry’s body. In this way, Behind the Candelabra reimagines the myth of Chopin’s own musicking disembodiedness for modern, queer purposes.
Nana Wang: “From Chopin to Nostalgic Hong Kong-Style Pop: Repurposing Chopin’s Etude, Op. 10, No. 1 on Bilibili”
Chopin’s works have long inspired diverse arrangements, from Leopold Godowsky’s virtuosic transcriptions to Eugen Cicero’s jazz interpretations. While these arrangements maintain recognizable ties to Chopin, the rise of digital platforms has enabled more radical reimaginings of the source text. This study explores how Schuwenn Z., a Chinese arranger and Bilibili blogger, reimagined Chopin’s Etude Op.10 No.1 into a nostalgic 1980s Hong Kong-style pop. Released in 2020 on Bilibili—China’s leading youth-oriented video-sharing platform—the video attracted over 30,000 views and widespread audience engagement. In this video, Schuwenn Z. simplifies Chopin’s harmonic framework, introduces new rhythmic patterns, and weaves a new melody using the synthetic timbre of the Yamaha P115. Entitled A Street Song, the piece humorously bridges Chopin’s canonical etude and nostalgic pop. Audience participation via real-time barrage comments reveals how listeners engaged with this piece, often associating it with Hong Kong pop icons like Jacky Cheung, or even likening it to Starbucks background music—suggesting that it resonates more than contemporary Chinese pop.
Beneath this seemingly humorous phenomenon lies a thought-provoking procedure of cultural reconstruction. Bilibili serves as a dynamic medium where time, space, geography, and musical style are reconfigured, and the original meaning of Chopin’s work is reinterpreted and challenged. Thus, this study aims to explore the following questions: How does Schuwenn Z. musically and aesthetically overlay the nostalgic sensibilities of 1980s Hong Kong pop onto Chopin’s etude? In what ways does this cross-cultural arrangement on a digital platform like Bilibili negotiate or disrupt the authenticity and authority of Chopin’s etude? Moreover, how do participatory mechanisms—such as real-time barrage comments—empower audiences to move beyond passive listening and actively engage as co-creators, reshaping the narrative and reception of Chopin? By addressing these questions, this research uncovers how participatory digital cultures in contemporary China mediate cultural hybridity, democratize creative authority, and challenge the ways in which Chopin is traditionally interpreted.
10:45–12:15 Politics and Reception (Eftychia Papanikolaou, Chair)
Scott Messing: “The Small Reveal: The Identity of Beethoven’s Brutus Bust”
Currently displayed in the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn is a bust labeled “Luc. Brutus,” referring to Lucius Junius Brutus, the Roman republic’s first consul. Beethoven’s purported ownership of this porcelain figure is not beyond question, following its first mention by Anton Schindler in the third edition (1860) of his Beethoven biography. Its prior history, however, is unknown. Even so, scholars have invoked it, owing to this ancient official’s extreme means to preserve the republic: he condemned his two sons to death for conspiring to overthrow the regime. Writers have linked this remarkable act of rescuing the state from the threat of tyranny to Beethoven’s political principles. Such narratives have been tidy, save for one fact: despite its label, the bust is not that of Lucius Brutus.
I begin with a review of the documentation regarding its provenance. For the first time, I identify the marble original and the site that produced the Bonn cast made from it. I then track other extant copies. Catalogues always labeled these as Caesar’s killer, Marcus Brutus, starting with its first mention in 1791, and persisting well into the nineteenth century. Analyzing casts of different sizes and the relative frequency with which their identities appeared, I argue that misnaming the Bonn bust was not a careless oversight by its maker. Rather, the mislabeling indicates that the name and dramatic story of the elder Brutus had greater appeal to any future recipient.
I conclude with a consideration that its misnaming is attributable to contriving a selective view of the composer’s political outlook and its attendant legacy. With this narrative, the new identification of the bust motivates a reconsideration of its position in Beethoven scholarship concerning the beliefs ascribed to his world view.
Rhianna Nissen: “The Opera that the ‘Public Sorely Missed’: Theaterpolizei Censorship and Auber’s Die Stumme von Portici on the Prussian Stage”
By 1830, Prussia had developed a robust theater censorship apparatus: the Theaterpolizei (theater police). The Theaterpolizei banned thousands of plays—including four hundred operas—between 1820 and 1917. As Hans Gerlach and others have noted, dramatic works were thought not only to hold the potential to spread revolutionary rhetoric but also, through their affective nature, to stir unrest in the audience that could transcend the walls of the theater. In August 1830, it would seem the Theaterpolizei’s worst fears were realized in Belgium: Daniel Auber’s 1828 opera, La Muette de Portici, it was thought, had incited the revolution that rid the country of Dutch rule when a riot broke out during a performance. Yet the Theaterpolizei still permitted performances of Die Stumme von Portici (in German translation). This paper explores why.
Despite its extensive operations, very little scholarship on the Theaterpolizei exists. This paper therefore turns to the records of the Theaterpolizei, held at the Geheimis Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin, to consider the organization’s philosophy and structure and the decision to allow Portici performances to continue. Letters between local Breslau and Magdeburg officials and the central Theaterpolizei in Berlin reveal theater censorship in Prussia to have been an ongoing negotiation between ridding the stage of subversive material and keeping the audience placated. In the end, Auber’s opera was saved by its popularity. The letters reveal a fear that taking the opera away from the public that clamored for it could be more dangerous than the opera itself. The case of Die Stumme von Portici reveals the Theaterpolizei’s concern that, just as revolutionary rhetoric on the stage could incite rebellion, so too could the act of censorship itself.
Jacques Dupuis: “Banning Gemütlichkeit on Sundays: Indiana’s Blue Laws and 19th-Century German Popular Musical Theater”
During peak waves of immigration to the United States in the 19 th century, Germans were quick to establish institutions that provided outlets for identity expression in both coastal and inland regions (Kamphoefner 1990). Many such institutions—including newspapers, schools, and numerous social choral societies and orchestras—followed Continental practice in emphasizing a perceived inextricable link between language and identity declared by Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In America, these threads entwined to underpin diasporic communities’ sense of Germanness, or “Deutschthum” (Lorenzkowski 2010). The German- language popular theater synthesized these institutions’ functions for immigrants across identity groups, yet its musical forms have remained largely marginal to scholarly attention, which has centered spoken and operatic genres. Often, this vital popular musical theater begot tensions between recent arrivals and their neighbors.
In this paper, I take Indianapolis, Indiana’s short-lived German-language Germania Theater (1877–1883) as a case study of local diasporic identity expression and enactment in the American Midwest. Contemporaneous newspapers report that citizens valued Germania as a haven of folk- and theatrical-musical Gemütlichkeit (conviviality) for Indianapolis’s German population, refuge from immigrant isolation and difficult labor for which audiences often sacrificed sleep and substantial wages. Building on John Koegel’s foundational study of New York German immigrant theater (2009), I look beyond canonical Midwestern German-American centers like Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. I trace a pamphlet war between Indianapolis’s parochial communities that manifest in thinly veiled anti-immigrant diatribes hidden behind pretenses of the Germania Theater’s violation of “blue laws.” These laws banned Sunday alcohol and theater performances, prohibitions Indianapolis Germans often flouted with impunity. Focused on this heretofore neglected region, I vectorize the Germania’s practices and repertoire to situate it within a network of Midwestern Deutschthum.
2:15–3:15 Law, Order, and Image (Kristen M. Turner, Chair)
Quentin Dishman: “Lies, Lawsuits, and Artistic License: The Making (and Remaking) of Thérésa, the People’s Diva”
The lives and careers of nineteenth-century popular music performers are difficult to reconstruct and examine. Documents are seldom preserved, and biographical information, when available at all, is filled with inconsistencies, errors, and secondhand anecdotes. Dubbed “la Patti de la chope” [Patti of the pint], Thérésa (Emma-Eugénie Valladon, 1837-1913) – comic singer, composer, and briefly theatre owner and director – was the first breakout star of café-concert and one of the most famous female musicians of late nineteenth-century France. Yet large question marks hang over her life, many of them tracing back to her.
Earning popular success (and critical rebuke) for her performances as an uncouth yodeling yokel in her late 20s, she was further propelled into public view as the subject of a litigious bidding-war between rival theatre directors. Riding high on the free publicity and “Thérésamanie,” she and a team of ghostwriters concocted a fictitious origin story: Memoirs of Thérésa, written by herself (1865). In this narrative, Thérésa, orphaned at twelve and unable to hold down a job delivering ladies’ hats, breaks into the world of popular theatre and eventually comes out on top as a serious, respectable, highly paid artist. Thérésa would go on to revise her life story many times, which itself became something of a long-running in-joke in the press. By the end of her life, she positioned herself as a prima donna emerita: she opened the doors of her country home to journalists and photographers and began dictating The True Memoirs of Thérésa, one excerpt of which was published upon her death. This paper will consider the active role Thérésa played in shaping and revising her public image over the course of her lengthy career, and what this tells us about the changing nature of popular musical celebrity between the middle and end of the nineteenth century.
Shaena B. Weitz: “The ‘Crimes’ of Frédéric Kalkbrenner: 19th-Century Celebrity Fraud and Para Social Relationships”
While the transformation toward what Lydia Goehr (1992) has called the Beethoven paradigm has been examined from a philosophical viewpoint, the material and discursive conditions that supported it remain much less understood. One prominent feature supporting Beethoven’s idealization and its far-reaching effects is the constructed existence of musical villains—the dangerous stars of yesteryear, vanquished by Beethoven's music-conceptual triumph. Central to these villain narratives are damaging stories that “unmask” the villains’ moral failures. For example, the pianist/composer Frédéric Kalkbrenner (1784–1849) was a former child prodigy with an impeccable pedigree and successful international career—someone widely hailed as a genius—but who was later ridiculed for faking an improvisation, and teaching his son to fake an improvisation. He was accused of duplicitous dealings with publishers and even espionage. These accusations of fraud are especially intriguing because they appear to be false themselves—stories of dubious origin aimed to discredit him.
More complex is that these fabricated stories remain attractive to our emotions today, circulating on classical blogs, YouTube comments, and in scholarship as well. The idea that we might have feelings about people we have never met—that we might love them or loathe them— is called a para-social relationship, or one-sided intimacy from afar. I argue that the existence of fraud stories, even if they are fictitious, is emblematic of a wider shift to a default para-social relationship based on the “social crediting” (Franck 2020) of trust. Using Kalkbrenner fraud stories as an inverse reflection of a posture that has been normalized as a universal, this paper will analyze what drove the development of para-social relationships in the nineteenth century in dialogue with recent work on celebrity intimacy (van Krieken 2018, Rojek 2022), and will examine their effects on evidence, historical and modern emotions, and music scholarship today.
3:30–5:00 Contextualizing Nineteenth-Century Domestic Song (Mary Paquette-Abt, Chair)
Laura K. T. Stokes: “The Dutch and the Quakers Dance in Sicily: An Exploration of Meyerbeer’s Sizilianische Volkslieder”
In the summer of 1816, the young composer Giacomo Meyerbeer spent several months in Sicily collecting music performed by street musicians. The collection of manuscripts from this project may possibly be the earliest documentation of Sicilian traditional music. Meyerbeer’s manuscripts eventually came into the holdings of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz, where they are now available in physical and digital form; in addition, a scholarly edition by Franz Bose called Meyerbeer: Sizilianische Volkslieder was published in 1970. Other than these accessible versions of the primary sources, however, Meyerbeer’s folksong collecting activities have received little scholarly attention.
Meyerbeer’s activities as a proto-ethnomusicologist, in collecting folk music from a region to which he had no direct connection, are worth unpacking, especially in the context of the larger phenomenon of early-nineteenth-century nationalistically-driven folksong collecting; in addition, close examination of the Sizilianische Volkslieder reveals that the Sicilian music that Meyerbeer collected is itself embedded in a complex web of musical portrayals of, and thus reception of, non Sicilians. The potentially multi-layered musical translation of non-Sicilian sonic identity may be found in two of the dance tunes in this collection: number 34, L’olandesa moderna (The Modern Dutch Dance) and number 35, Il Quacquero (The Quaker). Thus, in music found in Sicily, people from both Holland and the United States are represented sonically. In my presentation, I will introduce the overall contents of Meyerbeer’s collection, discuss potential motivations for undertaking this project, and closely examine the two dance tunes named above to explore the purpose and functioning of sonic Otherness in this context. I will conclude with considerations about how the music found in this collection could influence ideas of how Otherness works in Meyerbeer’s larger musical output.
James MacKay: “Parlor Songs and Ragtime Waltzes: Scott Joplin’s Triple-Meter Works”
Though Scott Joplin is justifiably famous for his ragtime compositions, which were typically in moderate to fast duple meter, he also wrote a handful of compositions, both early and late in his career, in triple meter. These works include parlor songs for piano and voice, and keyboard waltzes, two of which (Bethena of 1905 and Pleasant Moments of 1909) pervasively incorporate ragtime-style syncopations. Since Joplin’s first triple-meter compositions (the parlor songs Please Say You Will and A Picture of Her Face, both dating from 1895) pre-date his earliest rags from ca. 1899, these works provide a unique opportunity to trace the evolution of his musical style in general.
Using these triple-meter works as a baseline, this study will examine Joplin’s development as a composer, from his early parlor songs of 1895 inspired by the Charles Harris multi-million bestseller, “After the Ball,” through three early waltzes–Harmony Club Waltz (1896), Augustan Club Waltzes (1900), and Bink’s Waltz (1905)–to his acknowledged 1905 masterpiece, Bethena, in which waltz and ragtime meet for the first time on an equal footing. I will also explore Joplin’s follow-up work in triple meter, Pleasant Moments of 1909. Written shortly after Joplin moved to New York, it is the first and only work that he designated in print as a “ragtime waltz.”
Finally, as an afterword, I will explore how Joplin’s early and middle-period essays in triple time foreshadowed the waltzes and triple-meter ballads in his magnum opus, the opera Treemonisha, which he self-published in 1911.
Aradhana Arora and Nico Schüler: “Rediscovering Late 19th-Century African American Music: Reception and Analysis of Two Songs by Sam Lucas
Racial discrimination persisted after the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865). However, Black-only Minstrel and Jubilee ensembles became popular and offered opportunities for earning a good income and an outlet for artistic expression. Songs written for such performances also found their way into early Black Musical Theatre. The first Black music drama was Out of Bondage (1876), which was commissioned by the (abolitionist) Redpath Lyceum specifically for the Hyers Sisters and Sam Lucas; it depicted Black lives amidst slavery during and after the Civil War. Two songs that were originally written for African-American minstrel shows and later integrated into Out of Bondage are the Sam Lucas songs Shivering and Shaking Out in the Cold (1875) and Carve dat Possum (1874). While Shivering and Shaking is a song without racial reference about a “poor wretch” being out in the cold, Carve dat Possum is a humorous song written in African-American dialect and refers to catching, cooking, and eating an opossum. Both songs are in verse-chorus form and have a memorable melody with relatively simple harmonic progressions. But while Shivering and Shaking didn’t become immensely popular (according to mentions in newspaper articles), Carve dat Possum, based on the melody of the traditional spiritual Go Down, Moses, became a widely (internationally) performed and recognized song across racial boundaries. This paper will summarize the re discovery (primarily based on newspaper articles) of African American music and discuss the reception and an analysis of Sam Lucas’ songs Shivering and Shaking Out in the Cold and Carve dat Possum.