Keynote Performance: Clara Latham

Bertha the Mom and New Pope

March 2, 2018 (Friday), 7:00 - 9:00 p.m.

Experimental Theater (CPMC 122)

Bertha the Mom is a chamber opera for four players. On the program tonight are three scenes from this work in progress, which will premiere at Roulette on June 3 of this year. The opera is based on accounts of Bertha Pappenheim, aka Fräulein Anna O, the first patient of psychoanalysis. According to the case history written by Sigmund Freud’s collaborator Josef Breuer, Pappenheim invented the talking cure method that became the basis for psychoanalysis, and was cured by her treatment. This is contested by historians who claim that Breuer abruptly cut off Pappenheim’s treatment when she developed a hysterical pregnancy, alleging that she was pregnant with his child.

In my research, I am interested in the tension between the figures of Anna O and Bertha Pappenheim, as they represent radically different kinds of female subjects. Pappenheim was an active social worker, author, and political organizer. She founded a journal to publish articles on the subject of women’s rights and founded the German Women’s Association, as well as many orphanages, community homes, and other institutions to support women and children. The story of Anna O, the founding myth of psychoanalysis, amplifies Pappenheim’s voice in a different register, while simultaneously pathologizing her as hysterical.

Parts of the libretto are by James Currie.

Alice/Bertha: Jasper Sussman, Mike/Breuer: Jonathan Nussman, Alice’s Unconscious: Rachel Allen, Mike’s Unconscious: Kathryn Schulmeister

-

New Pope is a collaboration between myself and Robertson Thacher, of the Brooklyn based psychedelic group Oneida. We often augment our duo with guest performers. This evening, Robertson will be present virtually (via laptop), and violist Amy Cimini will join me in performance. Projections are by Victor Shepardson.

Bio: Clara Latham received her Ph.D. in Music from New York University. She is a 2017 - 19 fellow in music and sound at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. Her research interests include voice, the history of psychoanalysis, and popular and contemporary music of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her work has been supported by an NYU MacCracken fellowship, a NYU Dean’s Dissertation fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation fellowship in Women’s Studies, and the American Composer’s Forum. She has published articles in *Women & Music* and the Opera Quarterly. She is currently working on a monograph about the role of sound in the emergence of the psychoanalytic method titled "The Female Phonograph: Hysteria as vocal technology".

Her compositions have been performed widely, and she is active as a performer on the fringes of rock and experimental music. She was recently awarded a Jfund commissioning grant for New Music from the American Composer’s Forum to support her current work in progress, an opera about the birth of psychoanalysis. A workshop version of this piece will premiere at Roulette (Brookly, NY) in June 2018.

Keynote Address: George Lewis

Black Liveness Matters: Karel Čapek meets Blind Tom

March 3, 2018 (Saturday), 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.

Recital Hall (CPMC 127)

In 1920 the Czech writer Karel Čapek experienced an early success with the play R.U.R., which posed interaction and conflict between human capitalists and a new source of labor, the “robota,” which has come down to us in various languages as “robot.” Most English-language critics have been content with a translation of the Czech word as “forced labor,” but parallels to the condition of slaves under the US chattel system stand out at various points in the play. Thus, juxtaposing the famous slave composer-pianist Blind Tom with Rossum’s Universal Robots provides the basis for a complex critical assemblage comprising technology, blackness, liveness, and the sounding/listening subject.

Bio: George E. Lewis, Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University and Area Chair in Composition, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. His other honors include a MacArthur Fellowship (2002) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis is the author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008), and the co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016). His compositions have been presented by the London Philharmonia Orchestra, Mivos Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Spektral Quartet, Talea Ensemble, Musikfabrik, Splitter-Orchester, International Contemporary Ensemble, and others. His opera Afterword (2015) has been performed in USA, Europe, and UK. From 1991 to 2004, Lewis was Professor of Music and co-founder of the Critical Studies/Experimental Practices area at UCSD. See https://music.columbia.edu/bios/george-e-lewis.

Followed by a Roundtable discussion with George Lewis, Clara Latham, Roshanak Kheshti, and David Kirsh, moderated by David Borgo.