Program - The Society for American Music

Transcription

Association for Recorded Sound
Collections
&
The Society for
American Music
2004 Conference
March 10 - 14th
Cleveland, Ohio
Cleveland, Ohio
1
2004 Conference
Association for
Recorded Sound Collections
&
Society for
American Music
March 10-14, 2004
Cleveland, Ohio
2
ARSC-SAM Conference 2004
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Dear Members of SAM and ARSC,
On behalf of the Department of Music
at Case I’d like to welcome you to Cleveland,
to the cultural institutions of University
Circle, and to our University. We are excited
to be hosting your joint annual meeting, and
we are especially looking forward to your
campus visit on Friday.
The Case Department of Music offers
unique opportunities for both intensive
liberal arts education within a first-class
research institution and fine conservatory
training in the context of our Joint Program
with the Cleveland Institute of Music.
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We offer B.A. programs in performance,
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�� music history, audio recording, theory,
early music performance practices, and
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general musicianship, as well as a B.S. in
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music education. On the graduate level, we
offer specialties in the fields of musicology,
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music education, and early music
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performance practices, with M.A., D.M.A,
�� and Ph.D. degree programs available.
�� Situated on beautiful University Circle,
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we are neighbors and partners to CIM, the
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Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Museum
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of Art, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
�� and Museum. Embracing both tradition
�� and innovation, we are beneficiaries of and
�� contributors to one of the richest cultural
�� environments in the country.
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Cleveland, Ohio
The members of our faculty look
forward to seeing old friends and making
new acquaintances during your time in
Cleveland. By all means don’t hesitate to
be in touch if you have any special needs,
or just to say hello.
Warmly,
Georgia J. Cowart
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Music
Case Western Reserve University
3
Greetings, friends and colleagues!
On behalf of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, it is a pleasure
to welcome you all to Cleveland. I am particularly excited to be back with many
SAM friends. The last SAM meeting I was able to attend was the 1991 meeting
in Hampton, Virginia, and I have missed the stimulating and thoroughly academic
conference atmosphere.
This meeting, years in the planning, represents the culmination of many hours of
work on the part of many people for both organizations. We all owe a great thanks
to Local Arrangements chairs Bill Klinger (ARSC) and Mary Davis (SAM), Program
Chairs Louise Spear (ARSC) and Rob Walser (SAM), Conference Managers Brenda
Nelson-Strauss (ARSC) and Jim Hines (SAM), and to SAM’s Executive Director,
Mariana Whitmer.
Putting together such a complex yet rich four-and-a-half days is no small task. I
hope that members of both SAM and ARSC will be able to enjoy the different cultures
of each other’s meetings. The joint sessions will bring us together to discuss topics
of mutual interest, and these discussions should certainly spill out into the halls
and exhibits area. ARSC attendees will no doubt find it difficult to choose among so
many meetings (we typically do not have simultaneous sessions), and SAM folks
may be surprised at the breadth of experiences and backgrounds that ARSCers
bring, and the depth of knowledge that this represents.
The city of Cleveland provides a stimulating backdrop for this meeting! We
should all discover why, in the words of Ian Hunter, “Cleveland Rocks!”
Jim Farrington
President, Association for Recorded
Sound Collections
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2004 ARSC Board of Directors
President
Jim Farrington
First Vice President / President Elect
Brenda Nelson-Strauss
Second Vice President / Program Chair
Louise Spear
Secretary
Esther Gillie
Treasurer
Steven I. Ramm
Executive Director
Peter Shambarger
Members-at-Large
Vincent Pelote and David Seubert
Cleveland, Ohio
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T
he Association for Recorded Sound Collections is a non-profit organization
that promotes the preservation and study of sound recordings in all formats
and fields of music and speech. The Association is dedicated to serving the
needs of the sound archiving and collecting communities in specialized areas of
interest and activity, through its publications, annual conferences and the work of
its many committees.
Founded in 1966, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC)
is a non-profit organization dedicated to research, study, publication, and
information exchange surrounding all aspects of recordings and recorded sound.
With over one thousand members from twenty-three countries, the organization
is comprehensive in scope and reflects the interests and concerns of its members,
including:collectors, dealers, appraisers, archivists, librarians, historians, musicians,
students, discographers, reviewers, media producers and recording engineers.
Through publications, grants and awards, conferences, and the work of its
committees, the Association provides a forum for the development and dissemination
of discographic information in all fields and periods of recording and in all sound
media. In addition, ARSC works to encourage the preservation of historical
recordings, to promote the exchange and dissemination of research and information
about them, and to foster an increased awareness of the importance of recorded
sound as part of any cultural heritage
For more information about ARSC, visit http://www.arsc-audio.org/
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Welcome to the Annual Conference of the Society for American Music!
We are delighted to be meeting with the Association for Recorded Sound
Collections and hope you will take the opportunity to sample concerts,
lectures, and group discussions from the programs of both organizations.
Our two societies represent worlds that are closely related yet sporadically
intersecting, so this conference provides a wonderful opportunity to forge
new connections.
We are also pleased to name Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Productions
as SAM’s Honorary Member for 2004. Through his recordings and films,
Strachwitz has documented an extraordinary array of American vernacular
traditions. Join us on Saturday at 3:30 for a special session with him, which
will provide an overview of his achievements.
Other highlights of the conference include:
· a trip Thursday evening to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and
Museum
· the launching of “The SAM History Project” on Saturday at 12:30–an
ongoing oral history designed to chronicle the founding of our society
As we work to endow SAM’s future, we have arranged a seminar on
planned giving, which will be led by our representative from Merrill Lynch,
on Thursday at 5:45p.m.
Hearty thanks are due to Case Western Reserve University and the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, which are official sponsors of our
conference; to Mary Davis, Chair of the Local Arrangements Committee;
Robert Walser, Chair of the Program Committee; Mariana Whitmer,
Executive Director of SAM, and all those who have worked diligently to
make this event a reality.
I encourage those of you who are long-standing SAM members to
extend a hand and welcome the newcomers and students in our midst.
Most of all, enjoy the intellectual stimulation, exchange of information, and
generosity of spirit that make our conferences so distinctive.
Carol J. Oja
President
Society for American Music
Cleveland, Ohio
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Society for American Music
BOARD OF TRUSTEES
Officers
Carol Oja (Harvard University), president
Michael Broyles (Pennsylvania State University), president-elect
Ron Pen (University of Kentucky), vice president
R. Allen Lott (Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary), secretary
George Keck (Ouachita Baptist University), treasurer
Members at Large
George Boziwick (New York Public Library)
Mary DuPree (University of Idaho)
Denise Von Glahn (The Florida State University)
Josephine Wright (College of Wooster)
Susan Key (San Francisco Symphony)
Gayle Murchison (New Orleans, LA)
Members at Large Elect
Vivian Perlis (Yale University School of Music)
Wayne Shirley (Durham, New Hampshire)
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Mission of the Society for American Music
T
o stimulate the appreciation, performance, creation and
study of American music in all its diversity, and the
full range of activities and institutions associated with that
music. “America” is understood to embrace North America,
including Central America and the Caribbean, and aspects
of its cultures everywhere in the world
F
ounded and first named in honor of Oscar Sonneck (1873–1928),
early Chief of the Music Division in the Library of Congress and
pioneer scholar of American music, the Society for American Music is a
constituent member of the American Council of Learned Societies. It is designated
as a tax-exempt organization, 501(c)(3), by the Internal Revenue Service.
Conferences held each year in the early spring give members the opportunity to
share information and ideas, to hear performances, and to enjoy the company of
others with similar interests. The Society publishes three periodicals. American
Music, a quarterly journal, is published for the Society by the University of Illinois
Press. Contents are chosen through review by a distinguished editorial advisory board
representing the many subjects and professions within the field of American music.
The Society for American Music Bulletin is published three times yearly and provides
a timely and informal means by which members communicate with each other. The
annual Directory provides a list of members, their postal and email addresses,
telephone and fax numbers. Each member lists current topics or projects which are
then indexed, providing a useful means of contact for those with shared interests.
Annual dues are $65 for individuals, $32 for retirees and students, $20
for spouses or partners, and $82 for institutions. Membership applications can
be sent to Society for American Music, Stephen Foster Memorial, University
of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. For more information visit our web site
at <http://www.American-Music.org>.
Cleveland, Ohio
9
GENERAL CONFERENCE INFORMATION
Transportation
Transportation to off-site events, the Thursday evening reception at the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame and Museum and the excursion to University Circle on Friday afternoon will be
provided free of charge. Please check at the conference registration desk for information
on schedule and pick up locations.
Saturday Banquet
Tickets are required for this event. You should also have a marker indicating your entrée
preference. Additional tickets are available from the SAM registration desk until Friday at
12:00.
Interest Groups
Interest Groups are a vital part of the Society for American Music. Their programs are
designed to allow members to interact with others of like interests, sharing ideas and
information, but are open to all conference attendees. Interest Group sessions are planned
entirely by the groups themselves. Some feature guest speakers or performers, others will
have informal discussions.
Blue Dots
Small blue dots on name tags signify first-time attendees. Introduce yourself and welcome
them to the conference. If you are a first-timer, please come to the reception on Friday
morning ???(Rio Salado) to meet our board and committee chairs.
Silent Auction
All are welcome to participate in the SAM Silent Auction. This conference-long event serves
as an important fund-raiser for the Society for American Music, presently helping to fund
student travel and lodging for our conferences. Books, music, recordings, sheet music, and
other materials are donated by conference attendees and exhibitors. If you have brought
materials, bring them any time to the exhibit room. Then take some time to peruse the
offerings and write your bids on the sheets attached. You may overbid any bid on the sheet
in full dollar amounts. The auction closes during the reception on Saturday afternoon. You
may pick up your winnings later that evening (after dinner) or on Sunday morning.
Exhibits
The Exhibit Room is one of the liveliest spots at SAM conferences, housing commercial
exhibits, display of member publications, and the Silent Auction. Books, recordings, software,
and other materials will be on display and available for sale. Please drop in and thank the
vendors for attending our conference while you examine the materials that they have on
display. Exhibitors this year include:
A-R Editions
University of Illinois Press
Harmonie Park Press
University of Tennessee Press
Indiana University Press
University Press of Mississippi
Oxford University Press
W. W. Norton & Company
Scarecrow Press
Wesleyan University Press
The Scholar’s Choice
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Special Thanks
Thank you to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum for inviting us for a private tour
of the Rock Hall. Thank you to Case Western Reserve Univesrsity for sponsoring a special
reception on Friday afternoon and welcoming us to their city.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks for the support of
Conference Staff
ARSC Program Committee: Louise Spear (The GRAMMY Foundation), chair; Sam
Brylawski (Library of Congress), Nathan Georgitis (University of Oregon)
ARSC Local Arrangements Committee: Bill Klinger, chair
SAM Program Committee: Rob Walser (University of California, Los Angeles), chair, Larry
Starr, Beth Levy, Leonora Saavedra, David Neumeyer, Judy Tsou
SAM Local Arrangements Committee: Mary Davis (Case Western Reserve University),
chair; Dana Gooley, David Kay, Charlotte Newman, Christine Dorey,
Denise Seachrist, Sarah Tomasewski
SAM Silent Auction chair, Dianna K. Eiland
SAM Conference Manager, James R. Hines
Cleveland, Ohio
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Wednesday afternoon; Thursday morning
THE CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
Unless otherwise indicated, all sessions and events will take place at the Renaissance
Cleveland Hotel. All ARSC sessions will occur in the Gold Room. The four rooms
for SAM sessions are: Bush, Humphrey, Severance, and Van Aken.
WEDNESDAY, March 10
9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.
9:00 a.m.-4:45 p.m.
2:00-6:00 p.m.
6:00-8:00 p.m.
8:00-10:00 p.m.
ARSC Board Meeting
ARSC Pre-Conference Workshop
SAM Board Meeting
Exhibitor set-up, Registration open
ARSC-SAM Welcome Reception
THURSDAY MORNING, March 11
7:30 a.m.
8:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.
8:30-9:00 a.m.
SAM Interest Group Council Mtg
Exhibits
ARSC-SAM Welcome and Opening Remarks
Gold
ARSC 9:00-10:15 a.m.
U-S Phonograph Company: Cleveland and Beyond
Gold
Chair: SAMUEL BRYLAWSKI, Library of Congress
9:00-9:30 a.m.
U-S Phonograph Company: The Cleveland Firm That Dared to Challenge Edison and
Columbia
BILL KLINGER, Chardon, Ohio
9:30-10:15 a.m.
Recording Music and Experiences: J. Louis von der Mehden, Jr., at the New York Studio
of the U-S Phonograph Company
PHILIP C. CARLI, Rochester, New York
SAM 9:00-10:30 a.m.
Session 1a
Nostalgic Treatments of Composers
Severance
Chair: JOSÉ ANTONIO BOWEN, Georgetown University
Schubert on Broadway: Why He Never Married, Why the “Unfinished” Remained So
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Thursday morning
(and Why We Should Listen to This Story)
WYNN T. YAMAMI, New York University
The Pianist as Cultural Icon: Contributions from American Popular Theater
IVAN RAYKOFF, New School University, Washington
Dream Analysis: Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Weaving of Music, Speech, and Visuals in
Warner Brothers’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream
NATHAN PLATTE, University of Michigan
Musical Traditions and Dialogues in the Lone Star State
Session 1b
Bush
Chair: JAMES GRIER, University of Western Ontario
“Honking on One Note”: The Texas Tenor Sound and Its Challenge to Jazz Discourse
TRAVIS JACKSON, University of Chicago
“Only the Lonely”: Roy Orbison’s Sweet West Texas Style
ALBIN ZAK, University of Michigan
Blues and Routes in Texas
PAUL ANDERSON, University of Michigan
Session 1c
Van Aken
Asian-American Representations
Chair: DAVID FRANCIS URROWS, Hong Kong Baptist University
Negotiating “Looking Relations” in San Francisco’s Chinese Opera Theaters
NANCY YUNHWA RAO, Florida International University
If It’s Asian American, Can It Be Bad? Politics, Aesthetics, and the Music of Glenn
Horiuchi
LOREN KAJIKAWA, University of California, Los Angeles
Asian-American Violinists: Race, Gender, and Class in Classical Music Today
MAIKO KAWABATA, SUNY, Stony Brook
ARSC 10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Discography in the 21st Century
Gold
Chair: GARRETT BOWLES, San Diego, California
10:30-10:45 a.m.
Brian: A Relational Database Application for
Discographers
NOAL COHEN, Montclair, New Jersey
Cleveland, Ohio
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Thursday afternoon
10:45-12:00 noon
Discography in the Digital Age—Numerical Obsession Meets Mathematical Algorithm
DAVID J. DIEHL, Texas State Technical College
SAM 10:45-11:45 am
Session 2a
1939: Fostering European-American Music
Severance
Chair: IVAN RAYKOFF, New School University, New York
Secret Rooms, Borrowed Pianos, and Les plus grands musicians du moment:
Gaby Casadesus, Lucie Delécluse, and Franco-American Musical Exchange During the
Second World War
KENDRA LEONARD, Loveland, Ohio
Thwarting the Path to Permanence: Civic Sponsorship and the Legacy of West Virginia’s
FMP Orchestras
TRAVIS D. STIMELING, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Session 2b
Music and Teen Girls
Bush
Chair: MAIKO KAWABATA, SUNY, Stony Brook
Vinyl Communion: The Record as Ritual Object in Girls’ Rite-of-Passage Films
ROBYNN J. STILWELL, Georgetown University
She’s All That? Gender, Cultural Capital, and the Teen Movie Soundtrack
THEO CATEFORIS, Carleton College
Session 2c
SAM Interest Group: Gospel/Hymn
Session 2d
SAM Interest Group: Twentieth Century
Van Aken
Humphrey
Defining American Music
DAVID NICHOLLS, University of Southampton
SAM 12 noon-12:45 p.m.
Session 3a
INTERVIEW-RECITAL
Session 3b
PERFORMANCE
Severance
HALIM EL-DABH in Conversation with DENISE A. SEACHRIST
Bush
John Philip Sousa and the Art Song
JULIA GRELLA, Graduate Center, CUNY, and JOHN GRAZIANO, City
University of New York
14
Thursday afternoon
Session 3c
Interest Group: Popular Music
Van Aken
Nearly Famous, Really: Jane Scott’s Half-Century as Cleveland’s Reigning Rock Critic
JANE SCOTT, Cleveland, Ohio
PHILIP A. TODD, Oklahoma Baptist University, Moderator
12:00 NOON
SAM Membership Committee Meeting
Humphrey
12:00-1:00 p.m.
ARSC Lunch
THURSDAY AFTERNOON
ARSC-SAM 1:00-3:00 p.m.
Session 4d
Music Downloading and File Swapping
Gold
Chair: JAMES FARRINGTON, Eastman School of Music
1:00-1:30 p.m.
Unauthorized File Sharing--Academic Perspectives and Universities’ Responsibilities
CHARLES E. PHELPS, University of Rochester
1:30-2:00 p.m.
Unauthorized File-Sharing and the RIAA
MITCH GLAZIER, Recording Industry Association of America
2:00-2:30 p.m.
File Sharing--The Impact on Artists: The Recording Academy’s Response
MARC DICCIANI, National Advocacy Committee, National Academy of Recording Arts
& Sciences
2:30-3:00 p.m.
Open Forum with speakers and audience
SAM 1:00-3:00 p.m.
Session 4a
John Philip Sousa: A Sesquicentennial
Severance
Chair: THOMAS L. RIIS, University of Colorado, Boulder
Revaluation
John Philip Sousa: The Marine Band Years
CAROLYN BRYANT, Bethesda, Maryland
Making the Band: David Blakely, Patrick Gilmore, Theodore Thomas, and the Formation of
the Sousa Band
PATRICK WARFIELD, Georgetown University
Cleveland, Ohio
15
Thursday afternoon
Sousa’s The Liberty Bell and His Anomalous Quicksteps
JONATHAN ELKUS, University of California, Davis
About Our Official National March
PAUL E. BIERLEY, Westerville, Ohio
Session 4b
The Musical World of Halim El-Dabh
Bush
Chair: CECILIA SUN, University of California, Los Angeles
Halim El-Dabh and the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center
DENISE A. SEACHRIST, Kent State University, Trumbull Campus
Halim El-Dabh and African Pianism
AKIN EUBA, University of Pittsburgh
Orchestra Ethiopia 1963-75: Halim El-Dabh, Catalyst for Music Innovation and
Preservation
CYNTHIA TSE KIMBERLIN, Music Research Institute
Halim El-Dabh’s Opera Flies (1970-71)
DAVID BADAGNANI, Kent State University
Session 4c
Sexuality
Van Aken
Chair: ROBYNN J. STILWELL, Georgetown University
“Little Red Corvette”: Make-Out Mobile or Celestial Chariot? Religious Imagery and
Sexual Perversity in the Music of Prince
GRIFFIN WOODWORTH, University of California, Los Angeles
Bernstein’s Mass Appeal: Eclecticism, Omnivorism, Dirty Laundry, Musical Knowledge
NADINE HUBBS, University of Michigan
The Birds and the Squirrels: Finding David Diamond in Copland’s “Dickinson Songs”
COLIN ROUST, University of Michigan
Gay Culture-Making and the Underground Cabaret Record in Los Angeles
MITCHELL MORRIS, University of California, Los Angeles
ARSC 3:15-5:30 p.m.
Cleveland and the Wider World
Chair: ESTHER GILLIE, University of Illinois
3:15-4:00 p.m.
North Coast Jingles: The Career of a Commercial Composer in Cleveland
AMY WOOLEY, The College of William and Mary
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Thursday afternoon -- Friday morning
4:00-4:45 p.m.
The Cleveland-Chicago Nexus in Rhythm and Blues Recording in the Post World War II
Era
ROBERT PRUTER, Lewis University
4:45-5:30 p.m.
Polka, and Why It’s Good for You
DICK K. SPOTTSWOOD, Silver Spring, Maryland, JOE OBERAITIS, Orlando, Florida,
and LAURIE GOMULKA PALAZZOLO, Farmington, Michigan
SAM 3:15-4:00 p.m.
Session 5a
Severance
Performance
The Music of Sousa’s Cornet Soloists
CRAIG B. PARKER, Kansas State University
Session 5b
Bush
Performance
“It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing”: The Evolution of Swing Dancing
RENÉE CAMUS, Adelphi, Maryland
SAM 4:15-5:45 p.m.
Session 6a
Musical Theater
Severance
Chair: RAYMOND KNAPP, University of California, Los Angeles
"You’re Doin’ Fine, Oklahoma!”: The Making of an Icon, 1943-1950
KATHERINE L. AXTELL, Eastman School of Music
Brecht on Broadway: Kurt Weill’s Love Life (1948) in a Comparative Study with Stephen
Sondheim’s Assassins (1991)
LARA HOUSEZ, University of Western Ontario
Rodgers and Hart’s All Points West and Its Legacy
FELIX COX, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater
Session 6b
Black Female Jazz Performers and Musical Identity
Bush
Chair: MARTHA MOCKUS, SUNY Stony Brook
“A Paradox in the Hubbub of Swing”: Maxine Sullivan and Black Musical Identity in the
Swing Era
PATRICK BURKE, Washington University in St. Louis
Cleveland, Ohio
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Friday morning
Don’t Fence Me In!: The Effects of Race and Gender on the Shaping of the Image of
Black Women Jazz Instrumentalists
TAMMY KERNODLE, Miami University of Ohio
The Many Voices of Sarah Vaughan
ELAINE M. HAYES, University of Pennsylvania
Session 6c
New York Experimentalism
Van Aken
Chair: NADINE HUBBS, University of Michigan
A Big Noise for More to Hear: Bang on a Can and the Art of Audience Building
MARGARET MARTIN, SUNY Stony Brook
Resisting the Airport: Bang on a Can Performs Brian Eno
CECILIA SUN, University of California, Los Angeles
Downtown Overtones: Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, and the Art of the Guitar
CAROLINE O’MEARA, University of California, Los Angeles
5:45-7:00 p.m.
SAM Planning for the Future: A Seminar on
Planned Giving
President's Suite
PETER THOMPSON, Merrill Lynch
5:45-7:00 p.m.
SAM Brass Band Rehearsal
5:45-6:45 p.m.
Shape note singing
Severance
CRAIG PARKER, Coordinator
Bush
RON PEN, Coordinator
Thursday Evening ARSC-SAM Excursion
6:45 p.m.
7:00-10:00 p.m.
9:45 & 10:00 p.m.
Buses to Rock Hall
Reception, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and
Museum--reception and tour
Buses return to hotel
FRIDAY MORNING, March 12
7:30-8:30am
8:00am-12:00pm
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Reception for New Members
Exhibits
Friday morning
ARSC-SAM Session 8:30-10:00 a.m.
Session 7a
Recording the History of Folk and Traditional Music
Gold
Presented by the SAM Folk/Traditional Music Interest Group
Chair: RON PEN, University of Kentucky
Panelists: RONALD COHEN, Indiana University NW; KIP LORNELL, The George
Washington University; CHRIS STRACHWITZ, Arhoolie Records; and DICK
SPOTTSWOOD, WAMU-FM Radio.
SAM 8:30 - 10:00 a.m.
Session 7b
Film, Stage, and Tin Pan Alley
Severance
Chair: W. ANTHONY SHEPPARD, Williams College
“Is He Charlie Chaplin?”: Cinematic Impersonation and Song on the American Stage
SCOTT D. PAULIN, Princeton University
Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly? Tin Pan Alley and Early Film Practices
DANIEL GOLDMARK, University of Alabama
“I Think I’ve Got It!”: Tin Pan Alley Songwriters Through the Hollywood Lens
JENNIFER R. JENKINS, Columbia College Chicago
Session 7c
The Avant Garde in California and New York
Bush
Chair: CATHERINE PARSONS SMITH, University of Nevada, Reno
John Cage and Narratives of American History
BENJAMIN PIEKUT, University of California, San Diego
Lou Harrison and the Aesthetics of Revision
LETA MILLER, University of California, Santa Cruz
Morton Feldman’s Existential Rhetoric and the Authoring of Avant-Garde Identity
BRETT BOUTWELL, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
ARSC 10:15 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Personalities in American Music
Gold
Chair: LES WAFFEN, National Archives and Records Administration
10:15-11:00 a.m.
Rediscoverng George W. Johnson, The First African America Recording “Star”
TIM BROOKS, Greenwich, Connecticut
Cleveland, Ohio
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Friday afternoon --Friday evening
11:00-11:45 a.m.
Harry Belafonte and His Global Carnival
CARY GINELL, Origin Jazz Library, Thousand Oaks, California
11:45-12:30 p.m.
Carmichael’s Hoagy: The Hidden Complexity Behind the Homespun Persona
SUZANNE MUDGE, Indiana University
SAM 10:45-12:45am
Session 8a
The “Deep Structures” of Charles Ives: Mental,
Environmental, and Sentimental
Severance
Chair: CHARLES HIROSHI GARRETT, University of Michigan
Antimodernism, “The Celestial Railroad,” and the “Comedy” of Charles Ives
KARA ANNE GARDNER, University of San Francisco
Sylvan in the City: The Everyday Eternal in “Central Park in the Dark”
DENISE VON GLAHN, Florida State University
Memory, Form, and Invention in Charles Ives’s Fourth Violin Sonata
THOMAS L. RIIS, University of Colorado, Boulder
Charles Ives’s Simulacrum of Mental Life in Music
STUART FEDER, New York City
Session 8b
Jazz Now
Bush
Chair: WILLIAM KENNEY, Kent State University
Negotiating National Identity Among American Jazz Musicians in Paris
DAVID AKE, University of Nevada, Reno
Swing and Sehnsucht: Jazz After Postmodernism
DALE CHAPMAN, Mount Allison University
The Changing Standard of Jazz
DANA GOOLEY, Case Western Reserve University
Who Plays the Tune in “Body and Soul”?
JOSÉ ANTONIO BOWEN, Georgetown University
Session 8c
19th Century Topics
Van Aken
Chair: JOHN GRAZIANO, City University of New York
20
Saturday morning
“Woefully Out of Place”: Gottschalk in the Gilded Age
STEVEN BAUR, Occidental College
Amy Beach and Robert Browning: Two Artists of One Mind?
ADRIENNE FRIED BLOCK, Graduate Center, the City Univ of New York
Appropriation and Reappropriation From Slave Song to Neo-Nazi Propaganda
ANGELA D. HAMMOND, University of Kentucky
Confronting the Stereotypes, Confounding Cultural Hierarchy: An Unexplored Web of
American Musical Life, 1876-1880
KATHERINE K. PRESTON, College of William and Mary
Session 8d
SAM Interest Group: Gender and Music
Humphrey
Chair: LIANE CURTIS, Brandeis University
The Trouble with Minnie: Puccini’s Exotic American Heroine
ANNIE JANEIRO RANDALL, Bucknell University
Towards a Framework for Examining “Blackness” in Opera
NAOMI ANDRÉ, University of Michigan
MeShell Ndegéocello: Musical Articulations of Black Feminism
MARTHA MOCKUS, SUNY Stony Brook
“B-Girl Stance in a B-Boy’s World”: DJ Kuttin Kandi, Hip Hop Activist
ELLIE M. HISAMA, Brooklyn College
12:15-4:15 p.m.
12:30-1:30 p.m.
SAM COPAM Meeting
ARSC Lunch
FRIDAY AFTERNOON
SAM 1:30-2:30 p.m.
Session 9a
SAM Interest Group: Gay/Lesbian
Session 9b
SAM Interest Group: Band
Severance
Pink or Plaid: Two Biographical Approaches to Charles Griffes’s Homosexuality
HOWARD POLLACK, University of Houston
Bush
1:30 p.m.
Busses depart for afternoon outings
ARSC 2:15-4:30 p.m.
Cleveland, Ohio
21
Saturday morning--Saturday afternoon
The Cleveland Orchestra
Chair: BILL KLINGER, Chardon, Ohio
2:15-3:00 p.m.
A Recording History of the Cleveland Orchestra
DONALD ROSENBERG
3:00-3:45 p.m.
A Hundred Men and a Perfectionist: The Transformation of the Cleveland Orchestra
PETER MUNVES, RPM Productions Marketing Consultant, Merrick, NewYork
3:45-4:30 p.m.
Recording the Cleveland Orchestra: It’s Not Your Father’s Severance Hall
ROBERT CONRAD, President of WCLV/WRMR and Producer and Commentator for
The Cleveland Orchestra Radio Broadcasts; and BRUCE GIGAX, Audio Supervisor for
5:45 p.m.
SAM Student Forum Dinner
(ARSC Students Welcome!)
ARSC 7:30-10:30 p.m.
A Celebration of Music from Cleveland
Chair: MARY DAVIS, Case Western Reserve University
7:30-8:15 p.m.
Singing ‘bout the Sixth City: Cleveland, Ohio, in Popular Song
WILLIAM L. SCHURK, Bowling Green State University
8:15-9:00 p.m.
Rock ‘n’ Roll in Cleveland, Ohio
DEANNA R. ADAMS, Mentor, Ohio
9:00-9:45 p.m.
“Polka Capital”? “Home of Rock ‘n’ Roll”? “Little Nashville”?—A Cultural and Ethnic
History of Recording in Cleveland
SUSAN SCHMIDT HORNING, Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland
Institute of Art
SATURDAY MORNING, March 14
7:30-8:30 a.m.
Student Forum Breakfast Reception
7:30-8:30 a.m.
American Music Advisory Board Meeting
8:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. Exhibits
22
Saturday afternoon
ARSC-SAM Session 8:30-10:15 a.m.
Collections and Archiving
Session 10c
Gold
Chair: NATHAN GEORGITIS, University of Oregon
8:30-9:00 a.m.
The Difference is in the Moan: The Growing Pains of the Starr-Gennett Collection
ELIZABETH SURLES, Starr-Gennett Foundation, Richmond, IN
9:00-9:30 a.m.
Josiah K. Lilly and the Foster Hall Recordings
MARIANA WHITMER, University of Pittsburgh
9:30-10:00 a.m.
Herbert Elwell, Leonard Shure, and Mary Simmons: Classical Music in Cleveland in the Mid-20th
Century
MARC BERNSTEIN, Toronto, Canada
SAM 8:30-10:00 a.m.
Session 10a
African-American Art Music in the 1930s
Severance
Chair: JOSEPHINE WRIGHT, College of Wooster
Depression, War, and Rain: The Existence of African-American Opera Companies, 19301949
KAREN M. BRYAN, Arizona State University
Representing America, Instructing Europe: The Hampton Choir on Tour
LAWRENCE SCHENBECK, Spelman College
The Life and Works of Black Creek American Contemporary Composer Zenobia Powell
Perry: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Issues in American Music Biography
JEANNIE POOL, La Crescenta, California
Session 10b
1972
Bush
Chair: RON PEN, University of Kentucky
Free to Be… What You Want Me to Be
Folk Music and Gendered Identity Formation in 1970s Popular Children’s Music
YARA SELLIN, University of California, Los Angeles
“Cosmic American Music”: Country Rock and the Myth of Gram Parsons
OLIVIA CARTER MATHER, University of California, Los Angeles
Cleveland, Ohio
23
Saturday afternoon
The Ovaltine Politics of Lawrence Welk’s Champagne Music
J. BRADLEY ROGERS, University of Virginia
SAM 10:15 11:45 a.m.
Session 11
Severance
SAM Plenary Session
Teaching Controversial Aspects of American Music: A Panel Discussion
Chair: JIM DEAVILLE, McMaster University
CHARLES HIROSHI GARRETT, University of Michigan
SANDRA GRAHAM, University of California, Davis
CAROL OJA, Harvard University
RON PEN, University of Kentucky
GUTHRIE RAMSEY, University of Pennsylvania
MICHAEL SAFFLE, Virginia Tech
JOSEPHINE WRIGHT, College of Wooster
ARSC 10:15 a.m.-11:45 p.m.
New World and Telarc
Chair: MICHAEL GRAY, Voice of America Library
10:15-10:45 a.m.
The New World Records Story
DAVID HAMILTON, The Juilliard School
10:45-11:45 a.m.
The Telarc Story—From Direct-to-Disc and the Cleveland
Orchestra…to DSD…and Beyond
JACK RENNER, Chairman and Chief Recording Engineer, Telarc; and ROBERT
WOODS, President and Senior Producer, Telarc
11:45-1:00 p.m.
12:00 Noon
12:00 Noon
ARSC Lunch
SAM Development Committee
President's Suite
SAM Site Selection Committee
SATURDAY AFTERNOON
ARSC 1:00-2:30 p.m.
Recorded Sound: History and Science
Chair: DAVID SEUBERT, University of California, Santa Barbara
1:00-1:45 p.m.
Dayton C. Miller: The Clevelander Who Knew All About Sound Recording
GEORGE BROCK-NANNESTAD, Patent Tactics, Denmark
24
Saturday evening -- Sunday morning
1:45-2:30 p.m.
The Radio: Recorded vs. Live Paradigm
JAMES R. POWELL, JR., Gramophone Adventures, Portage, MI
ARSC 2:30-4:00 p.m.
Magnetic Tape Restoration and Transfer
ARSC Technical Committee Roundtable
Moderator: GARY GALO, Crane School of Music, SUNY, Potsdam, ARSC Technical
Committee, Co-Chair
Panelists: ADRIAN COSENTINI, VidiPax, New York, NY; JOSEPH PATRYCH, Patrych
Sound Studios, Bronx, NY; DENNIS ROONEY, New York, NY; JON M. SAMUELS,
Recorded Legacy, New York, NY; SETH B. WINNER, Rodgers and Hammerstein Archive,
NYPL, Seth B. Winner Sound Studios, Inc., ARSC Technical Committee Co-Chair.
SAM 1:15-3:15 p.m.
Session 12a
Film Music
Severance
Chair: NADINE HUBBS, University of Michigan
Seen From the Street: Hollywood Underscoring, Urban Modernity, and Alfred Newman’s
“Street Scene”
MATTHEW MALSKY, Clark University
The Performance of Assimilation: Power and Commerce in Cuban Love Song
JONATHAN GREENBERG, University of California, Los Angeles
“The Last Great Cause”: Blitzstein, Thomson, and The Spanish Earth
CAROL A. HESS, Bowling Green State University
Aaron Copland and the Aesthetics of Hollywood
MARK CLAGUE, University of Michigan
Session 12b
Opera
Bush
Chair: NAOMI ANDRÉ, University of Michigan
Puccini, Politics, and Patriotism
JOANN TARICANI, University of Michigan
Caruso and His Cousins: Portraits of Italian Americans in the Operatic Novelty Songs of
Edwards and Madden
LARRY HAMBERLIN, Brandeis University
“Who Wants Real? I Want Magic!” Musical Madness in André Previn’s A Streetcar Named
Desire
Cleveland, Ohio
25
Sunday morning
NICHOLE MAIMAN, University of Maryland
Session 12c
Contemporary Popular Musics
Van Aken
Chair: ALBIN ZAK, University of Michigan
“Live More Musically” The Seductive Sounds of Starbucks’ Siren Songs
ERIC MARTIN USNER, New York University and Sarah Lawrence College
Dance Dance Revolution, Cyber-Dance Communities, and Musical Taste
JOANNA DEMERS, University of Southern California
Changing Wigs: Subcultural Dynamics and Performance Practices in the Southern
California Metal Tribute Scene
GLENN PILLSBURY, University of California, Los Angeles
Hand Jive and Ear Prudence
WALTER EVERETT, University of Michigan, and JOHN COVACH, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill
Session 12d
Student Forum Panel: Teaching American Music
Humphrey
Co-Chairs: MARIA CIZMIC, University of California, Los Angeles, and LAURA
PRUETT, Middle Tennessee State University
ROBERT WALSER, University of California, Los Angeles
ELISABETH BARKLEY, Foothill College
RICHARD CRAWFORD, University of Michigan
DAVID B. PRUETT, Middle Tennessee State University
SAM 3:30-4:00 p.m.
Session 13a
Performance
Session 13b
Performance
Severance
Two Gems of Ohio: Julia Perry and Zenobia Powell Perry
SEBRONETTE BARNES, Cheyney University of Pennsylvania
Bush
Like Brothers: The Music of Ernst Bacon and Otto Luening
HARLIE G. SPONAUGLE, Arlington, Virginia, and BARBARA WILKINSON,
Washinginton, D.C.
SPECIAL SAM SESSION 3:30-4:15 p.m.
Chris Strachwitz
The Society for American Music Honorary Member for 2004, Christ Strachwitz, will
26
Sunday morning
show excerpts from some of his films and discuss his current projects, including the
digitization of the Frontera Collection of Mexican Music.
4:00-5:30 p.m.
4:15 p.m.
Annual ARSC Business Meeting
Gold
Annual Meeting of the Society for American Music
Severance
5:30-6:45 p.m.
7:00 pm
ARSC-SAM Reception, Band Concert, and
Silent Auction Closing (all welcome)
Banquet (ticket required)
SUNDAY MORNING, March 14
7:30-8:45 a.m.
SAM Board Meeting
ARSC 8:30-10:15 a.m.
Record Companies: The Ohio Influence
Chair: JERRY FABRIS, Edison National Historic Site
8:30-9:00 a.m.
James Andem and the Ohio Phonograph Company
PATRICK FEASTER, Indiana University, and DAVID N. LEWIS, All Music Guide
9:00-9:30 a.m.
“The King of Them All”—Syd Nathan and the Rise and Fall of King Records (Cincinnati,
Ohio)
BEN GRILLOT, VidiPax, New York
9:30-10:15 a.m.
Cleveland and Its Role in the Birth of the DIY Recording Industry
PAUL MAROTTA, New World Records
SAM 9:00-10:30am
Session 14a
Mexican, Cuban, and African Inspirations
Severance
Chair: CAROL A. HESS, Bowling Green State University
Revueltas, The Chicago Years (1919-1925)
ROBERT PARKER, Coral Gables, Florida
Ernesto Lecuona’s Danzas Afrocubanas and the Mechanics of Stylization
ERICA SCHEINBERG, University of California, Los Angeles
“Afrikanische Musik in New York City”: Steve Reich and the Africanization of American
Cleveland, Ohio
27
Art Music
MARTIN SCHERZINGER, Eastman School of Music
Session 14b
Song in the 1930s
Bush
Chair: DANIEL GOLDMARK, University of Alabama
The Poisonous Idyll: Hanns Eisler’s Hollywood Songbook
MARGARET JACKSON, Florida State University
Delivering Miss Otis’s Regrets: Performers and Arrangers Tackle Cole Porter’s Tale of an
Unlikely Lynching
TODD DECKER, University of Michigan
Every Love But True Love: Unstable Relationships in Cole Porter’s “Love For Sale”
MICHAEL BUCHLER, Florida State University
Session 14c
Reception Issues
Van Aken
Chair: DAVID NICHOLLS, University of Southampton
“Show Them What Bad Music Is”: The American Premiere of Schoenberg’s Chamber
Symphony No. 1, Op. 9
JAMES M. DOERING, Randolph-Macon College
Searching for Musical Modernism in 1920s Los Angeles
CATHERINE PARSONS SMITH, University of Nevada, Reno
Toward a Reception History of Gershwin’s Concerto in F, 1925-1937
TIMOTHY FREEZE, University of Michigan
Session 14d
SAM Interest Group: Connecting Outside the Academy
Humphrey
JOSEPH HOROWITZ, New York, Chair
DEANE ROOT, University of Pittsburgh
DALE COCKRELL, Vanderbilt University
ARSC 10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Funk, Punk, and the Blues
Chair: BRYAN CORNELL, Library of Congress
10:30-11:00 a.m.
The Dayton Funk Movement
JASON HOUSLEY, Indiana University
11:00-11:30 a.m.
Ain’t It Fun Knowing You’ll Never Be Number One: Ohio Artpunk 1972-1987
28
DAVID N. LEWIS, All Music Guide
11:30-12:00
Red, White, and Whose Blues? Questions of Authenticity, Appropriation and Identity from
1950-2003
ROBERTA FREUND SCHWARTZ, University of Kansas
SAM 10:45-12:15 a.m.
Session 15a
Severance
PERFORMANCES
10:45-11:30 a.m.
Songs by Cleveland Composers
STEPHANIE TINGLER, University of Georgia, and WILLIAM OSBORNE, Denison
University
11:45-12:15 p.m.
Normand Lockwood’s Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
KAY NORTON, Arizona State University, the University Singers of the University of
Alabama, GREGORY R. GENTRY, University of Alabama, Director
Session 15b
Jazz Then
Bush
Chair: DAVID AKE, University of Nevada, Reno
Borrowed Memories of the American South: Music, Imagination, and Identity in Duke
Ellington’s Deep South Suite
ANDREW BERISH, University of California, Los Angeles
Jelly Roll Morton and the Spanish Tinge
Roustabouts, Black Levee Workers, and the Origins of Jazz Along the Mississippi and Ohio
Rivers, 1865-1917
WILLIAM KENNEY, Kent State University
Session 15c
Orientalism
Van Aken
Chair: NANCY YUNHWA RAO, Florida International University
Henry Eichheim, Henry Cowell, and Japan
W. ANTHONY SHEPPARD, Williams College
Beyond the Pleasure-Dome: The Asian-Influenced Music of Charles Tomlinson Griffes
Henry Cowell’s Ongaku and a Transethnic Basis for the Tone Cluster
PETER SCHIMPF, Indiana University
Cleveland, Ohio
29
12:00-12:15 p.m.
30
ARSC-SAM Closing Remarks
Abstracts for Thurday morning—Session 1
PROGRAM ABSTRACTS
Thursday, ARSC Session, 9:00 - 10:15 a.m.
U-S Phonograph Company: Cleveland and Beyond
U-S Phonograph Company: The Cleveland Firm That Dared to Challenge
Edison and Columbia
BILL KLINGER, Chardon, Ohio
Between 1909 and 1914, the U-S Phonograph Company developed, manufactured, and
sold an innovative line of high-quality cylinder phonographs and records. The technically
advanced U-S products posed enough of a competitive threat to prompt Thomas Edison’s
Legal Department to engage in industrial espionage and to file a series of lawsuits. This
presentation offers an overview of the Cleveland firm, their technology and products, and
the people who worked to build the company as well as those who wished to put it out of
business.
Recording Music and Experiences: J. Louis von der Mehden, Jr., at the New
York Studio of the U-S Phonograph Company
PHILIP C. CARLI, Rochester, New York
American cellist-composer-conductor J. Louis von der Mehdeh, Jr., worked in many
acoustic recording studios during the 1910s, including those of Victor, Columbia, Pathé,
and Lyraphone. His happiest phonographic experiences occurred at the U-S Phonograph
Company, where he played for, arranged, and conducted dozens of orchestral, band, and vocal
selections for “U-S Everlasting” cylinder recordings. His extensive diaries detail individual
sessions, solo artists, and the carefully chosen instrumentalists in the U-S ensembles. The
diary entries, coupled with corresponding recordings, reveal the intimate interactions between
management, technical staff, and company musicians that resulted in the inventive, wellrecorded, and artistically imaginative U-S cylinders.
Thursday, SAM Session 1, 9:00-10:30 a.m.
1a Nostalgic Treatments of Composers
Schubert on Broadway: Why He Never Married, Why the “Unfinished”
Remained So (and Why We Should Listen to This Story)
WYNN T. YAMAMI, New York University
Blossom Time, the fictionalized bio-musical by Sigmund Romberg and lyricist
Dorothy Donnelly, was an overwhelming commercial success on Broadway in
the early 1920s. The composer Franz Schubert, as the subject of the musical, was
transformed into a dramatic character who poured his emotions into song and
ultimately surrendered human love for a loftier companionship with the muse.
In this presentation, I will outline the origins of this depiction: highbrow versus
Cleveland, Ohio
31
Abstracts for Thursday morning—Session 1
lowbrow, classical music versus popular music, Europe versus America, and commercial
enterprise versus cultural brokerage.
The Pianist as Cultural Icon: Contributions from American Popular Theater
IVAN Raykoff, New School University, Washington
In representing the figure of a Romantic concert pianist, many American literary works and
Hollywood films borrow liberally from the histories and music of celebrated European composers
and performers. American popular theater has also been a primary arena for the development and
deployment of such representations. This paper examines the text, music, and production history
of three Broadway plays—Hermann Bahr’s The Concert (1910), Philip Moeller’s Madame Sand
(1917), and Harry B. Smith’s White Lilacs (1928)—to demonstrate an important link between
the historical culture of the nineteenth-century European virtuoso and this figure’s perpetuity in
twentieth-century American popular culture.
Dream Analysis: Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Weaving of Music, Speech, and Visuals in Warner
Bros.’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream
NATHAN PLATTE, University of Michigan
Erich Wolfgang Korngold first arrived in Hollywood to adapt music for the film, A Midsummer Night’s
Dream (1935). Using Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music as a foundation, Korngold constructed
a score containing his most intricate intertwining of musical and visual elements. His alterations to
Mendelssohn’s music are noteworthy and reveal a deep sensitivity to narrative tone. In addition, his
association with studio personnel expanded the role of music within the film’s production and placed
some cinematic effects at the service of the score. As analysis will show, Korngold’s score enriches
one’s perspective on the composer’s later Hollywood career.
1b Musical Traditions and Dialogues in the Lone Star State
“Only the Lonely”: Roy Orbison’s Sweet West Texas Style
ALBIN ZAK, University of Michigan
Early rock and roll is widely portrayed as a fusion primarily of rhythm and blues and country music,
exemplifying a different sensibility from contemporary styles of major-label urban pop. Rock and roll
between 1959 and 1963, on the other hand, saw a reestablishment of many pop stylistic conventions
among the so-called teen idols, particularly a return to a more polished sound. Roy Orbison’s career
suggests that there was more of a latent pop sensibility in early rock and roll than mainstream
historiography has acknowledged. At Sun Records in Memphis during the 1950s, his label-mates
included Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, and his recordings fit comfortably within Sun’s prevailing
rockabilly style. This paper examines the influence of independent label recording practices on rock
and roll’s early sonic style and takes a look at the pop affinities of a one-time “rockabilly cat.”
1c Asian-American Representations
Negotiating “Looking Relations” in San Francisco’s Chinese Opera Theaters
NANCY YUNHWA RAO, Flordai International University
Nineteenth-century tourists’ view of San Francisco’s Chinese opera theaters frequently reveals
not only a reaction typical of an American’s attitude toward Chinatown but also an orientalist
fantasy about the effeminate Other. Nowhere was this more poignant than their response to female
impersonators in Chinese opera. How did the theaters function as an apparatus of gaze? Whether
or not the female impersonation constituted “gender-crossing”? And for whom? The spectatorship
is on one level determined and structured by a preconceived notion, and on another level a non-
32
Abstracts for Thursday morning— Session 2
static and endless dialogical process. I will explore the tensions among the different levels, and the
ways that the theatrical performance constructed the spectator and the spectator shaped the encounter.
“If It’s Asian American Can It Be Bad?” Politics, Aesthetics, and The Music of Glenn Horiuchi
LOREN KAJIKAWA, University of California, Los Angeles
Rhetorically asking, “If it’s Asian American can it be bad?” Kajikawa identifies a problem confronted
by Asian American artists when they attempt to represent their history and viewpoints in an American
musical soundscape. By combining musical and historical analysis to unpack the hermeneutics of Glenn
Horiuchi’s “Terminal Island Sweep,” Kajikawa shows how and why one composer bent and broke
existing musical conventions. In demonstrating the interdependency of musical interpretation and Japanese
American history, he brings Asian American studies and musicology into dialogue.
Asian-American Violinists: Race, Gender, and Class in Classical Music Today
MAIKO KAWABATA, SUNY, Stony Brook
This paper aims to lay the groundwork for studying Asian-American performers in the classical music
world by exploring issues of identity in violin performance. Nowhere are questions of race, gender, and
class more problematic, I believe, than in the case of women violinists. By identifying and breaking
down stereotypical views of them as “exotic” creatures, as automatons, and as compromised peoples in
American assimilation, I seek to fill the gaps that exist both in studies of Asian-American experience
and in accounts of contemporary classical music in the United States.
Thursday, ARSC Session, 10:30 - Noon
Discography in the 21st Century
Brian: A Relational Database Application for Discographers
NOAL COHEN, Montclair, New Jersey; STEVE ALBIN, Montclair, New Jersey; and MICHAEL
FITZGERALD, Scotch Plains, NJ
Brian is a relational data base application used to compile standard discography information. Named
after Brian Rust, who perfected the chronological recording session format for print discographies, the
application tracks every aspect of a record date, from sidemen to songs to composers to releases. All of
the important pieces of data are instantly cross-referenced and searchable. So far, Brian has been used
to create discographies of nearly 30 pop and jazz artists including Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis, Jr. and
Peggy Lee. It is available for both Macintosh and Windows platforms and is free for non-commercial
use: http://www.jazzdiscography.com/
Discography in the Digital Age—Numerical Obsession Meets Mathematical Algorithm
DAVID J. DIEHL, Texas State Technical College
Projects like Canada’s Virtual Gramophone point to a potential explosion in access to discographic
information while ARSC’s own AVRL (American Vintage Record Labelography) exemplifies both the
benefits and difficulties of digital discography. Future efforts should have much more of the expertise
“built in”, requiring a greatly enlarged and refined set of standards, particularly if eXtensible Markup
Language rather than a proprietary format is used. Discussions will center on the widely varying needs
of discographers, the role of ARSC and the current AVRL database structure, and the basics of XML
and its application to discography.
Thursday, SAM Session 2, 10:45–11:45 a.m.
2a 1939: Fostering European-American Music
Cleveland, Ohio
33
Abstracts for Thursday morning—Session 2–3
Secret Rooms, Borrowed Pianos, and Les plus grands musicians du moment: Gaby Casadesus,
Lucie Delécluse, and Franco-American Musical Exchange during the Second World War
KENDRA LEONARD, Loveland, Ohio
In September 1939, French artists and composers fled Europe for the United States, including Gaby
Casadesus. Intent on preserving the Conservatoire Américain de Fontainebleau, where she taught
in the summer, Casadesus made arrangements for the Conservatoire to operate in the United States.
In New England, Casadesus hosted “les plus grands musicians du moment,” providing a European
atmosphere for students and offering colleagues a wartime haven. In France, Conservatoire secretary
Lucie Delécluse worked to save the Conservatoire from occupying German troops. Their accounts
illustrate the relationship between French and American musicians as allies and artistic partners and
create a view of cultural life and advocacy during the war.
Thwarting the Path to Permanence: Civic Sponsorship and the Legacy of West Virginia’s Federal
Music Project Orchestras”
TRAVIS D. STIMELING, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Federal Music Project of the Works Progress Administration (FMP) arrived in West Virginia in
1936 to establish orchestras in the state’s cities and to provide temporary employment for displaced
musicians. The FMP orchestras also presented free public concerts to boost morale. When federal
funding and control of the FMP ceased in 1939, urban socialites sought to reestablish their social
status through musical patronage and by promoting orchestral programs that ignored public tastes.
This paper explores the post-Depression restoration of the canon in local orchestral programs and its
implications for the state of art music in West Virginia.
2b Music and Teen Girls
Vinyl Communion: Girls, records, and ritual in coming-of-age films
ROBYNN STILWELLl, Georgetown University
While films like High Fidelity and Ghost World have depicted male record collectors in
stereotypical terms—demonstrating just how recognizable their systemizing and hierarchizing
tendencies are—the relationship between girls and records is at least as intense, though of a
different order, in films like Heavenly Creatures, The Virgin Suicides, and Little Voice. Not
only are the girls invested in the music to a greater degree, they treat the records, materially,
as ritual objects, infused with identity (both of the artists and the girls themselves) and
magic. In each film, the records’ destruction precipitate crises of self and plot resolution.
She’s All That? Gender, Cultural Capital and the Teen Movie Soundtrack
THEO CATEFORIS, Carleton College
During the 1980s, and again in the late 1990s, the rise of “teen movies” like Valley Girl and She’s
All That signaled the prominence of the compilation soundtrack, a scoring technique that allows
filmmakers to associate youth groups with a wide range of popular music styles. Many of these teen
movies play on one of the most visible signs of teenage cultural autonomy: the display of musical
taste. This paper examines how the cultural capital of musical taste – most often associated with
male characters in the movies of the early 80s – has since become primarily the province of female
characters.
2d Interest Group:Twentieth Century
Defining American Music
34
Abstracts for Thursday afternoon—Session 4a
America’s official motto, ‘e pluribus unum,’ is direct in its meaning and inspiring in its vision: that out
of disparateness--of peoples, beliefs, values, ambitions--should come an overreaching unity of aim and
purpose. The motto is certainly a statement both of demographic fact, and of political intent; yet, given
that the United States is home to at least as many cultures as there are distinct cultural groups within the
society as a whole, how can it be applied to music? This informal presentation will argue that while it
is easy to identify a plethora of American musics, the definition of an American music is another matter
entirely. Ultimately, if there is one American sound from among the many--an ‘unum e pluribus’--what
is it? And, more importantly, can such an ‘American’ sound ever be heard with anything other than
discomfort by the American
establishment?
Thursday, SAM Session 3, 12:00 noon - 12:45 p.m.
3a Interview-Performance
HALIM EL-DABH in Conversation with DENISE A. SEACHRIST
Internationally recognized as a major twentieth-century composer, Halim El-Dabh (b. in Cairo 1921;
U.S. citizenship 1961), came to the United States in 1950, to study with Aaron Copland and Irving Fine.
El-Dabh developed close associations with many prominent figures in twentieth-century music and dance,
including Cowell, Cage, Hovhaness, Bernstein, Verèse, Stokowski, Graham, and Robbins. The first-ever
biography of the composer, written by Denise A. Seachrist, was released by the Kent State University
Press in April 2003. Seachrist will interview El-Dabh, whose music has been heard daily since 1961 at
the Sound and Light Show at the pyramids of Giza, about his musical life.
3b Performance
John Philip Sousa and the Art Song
JOHN GRAZIANO, City College and Graduate Center, CUNY
JULIA GRELLA, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Although John Philip Sousa is known worldwide as the “March King,” leading many to believe that he
wrote only marches, his musical oeuvre includes several other genres, with more than a dozen comic
operas and over sixty art songs, which represent him in a more intimate venue, and span his entire career.
This lecture/performance provides a brief introduction to the songs, examining Sousa’s text settings
and use of song form in relation to other turn-of-the-twentieth century American composers of the art
song, included Amy Beach, George Chadwick, and Arthur Foote. Songs selected from various periods
in Sousa’s career are performed.
Thursday, ARSC-SAM Session, 1:00 - 3:00 p.m.
Music Downloading and File Swapping: Differing Views
Unauthorized File Sharing—Academic Perspectives and Universities’ Responsibilities
CHARLES F. PHELPS, University of Rochester
Illegal Peer to Peer (P2P) sharing of music and movie is an important new legal problem brought about
new technologies—digitized versions of musical performances and high-speed digital communication
technologies. Higher education has a particularly important role in the P2P issue because our students
are very active in its use and because our campus networks offer very high speeds of data transmission.
Solving this problem involves education, creation of legitimate alternatives, and a careful balancing of
interventions (“bandwidth” control of our networks) with extremely important concerns about privacy
and freedom of speech, issues we hold very dear.
Cleveland, Ohio
35
Abstracts for Thursday afternoon—Session 4b
Unauthorized File-Sharing and the RIAA
MITCH GLAZIER, Recording Industry Association of America
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is the trade group that represents the U.S.
recording industry. Its members are the record companies that create, manufacture, and distribute
approximately 90% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States. Its
mission is to foster a business and legal climate that supports and promotes its members’ creative and
financial vitality. In support of this mission, the RIAA works to protect intellectual property rights
worldwide and the First Amendment rights of artists, to conduct consumer industry and technical
research, and to monitor and review state and federal laws, regulations, and policies.
File Sharing—The Impact on Artists: The Recording Academy’s Response
MARC DICCIANI, National Advocacy Committee, National Academy of Recording Arts &
Sciences
Illegal downloading threatens the very core and future of the creative community, as well as our culture.
The digital world has made infringement on creative works easy, private, constant, global, and accepted.
As connection speed and storage volume continue to increase, the number and quality of works that
are at risk will dramatically increase. There are alternative choices available, but not enough. The first
decision that has to be made is a desire to become informed. Knowledge and information must join
the debate if we are to preserve and enrich our musical legacy.
Thursday, SAM Session 4: 1:00 - 3:00 p.m.
4b John Philip Sousa: A Sesquicentennial Revaluation
John Philip Sousa — The Marine Band Years
CAROLYN BRYANT, Bethesda, MD
John Philip Sousa’s first band directorship was with the U.S. Marine Band, from 1880 to 1892, during which he worked to improve the band, at the same time undertaking music-related projects not
associated with the military. Two early scrapbooks provide material detailing the scope and variety of
his activities, attesting to his all-around energy and his determination to raise his own and the band’s
reputation. Drawing on this and similar sources, I will discuss Sousa’s time with the Marine Band,
focusing particularly on his and the band’s extracurricular activities as they illuminate the years during
which Sousa developed the skills that enabled him to form his own highly successful touring band.
Making the Band: David Blakely, Patrick Gilmore, Theodore Thomas, and the Formation of the
Sousa Band
PATRICK WARFIELD, Georgetown University
While much of the credit for John Philip Sousa’s rise to fame in the early 1890s rests with the
bandleader’s skills as a composer and conductor, his reputation was also assisted by the clever
maneuverings of his manager David Blakely. Blakely worked tirelessly to secure the engagements and star players of the recently deceased bandmaster Patrick Gilmore, and to place Sousa
at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. While the efforts of the Exposition’s musical director,
Theodore Thomas, to educate fairgoers foundered, visitors flocked to Sousa’s performances; and
while the debacle forced Thomas’s resignation, it solidified Sousa’s reputation as Gilmore’s heir.
Sousa’s The Liberty Bell and His Anomalous Quicksteps
JONATHAN ELKUS, University of California, Davis
Just what do we mean by the oft-used phrase “Sousa March”? Drawing on core examples from the
early 1890s, the presentation summarizes the trademark formal and stylistic qualities that typify Sousa’s
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marches, and proposes the pivotal distinction that separates them into two categories: the “long form”
(Sousa’s grand march derivative) and “short form” (his quickstep derivative).
4c The Musical World of Halim El-Dabh
Halim El-Dabh and the Columbia/Princeton Electronic Music Center
DENISE A. SEACHRIST, Kent State University, Trumbull Campus
This paper addresses Egyptian-born, American composer, Halim El-Dabh (b. 1921) and his early approach
working with magnetic tape at the Columbia/Princeton Electronic Music Center with electronic-music
pioneers Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky in 1959. El-Dabh conceived noise as a piece of
sculpture from which he could chisel the sound. The composer became obsessed with the realization
that the human range of hearing is limited. He was overwhelmed by a strange and disturbing thought
that although the sound frequencies are there, humans are not capable to perceive them. Three of his
electronic pieces are examined.
Halim El-Dabh and African Pianism
AKIN EUBA, University of Pittsburgh
The concept of an African pianism was pioneered by Akin Euba and subsequently endorsed by other
African composers, notably Nketia. In developing the theme of African pianism, Euba stated that
techniques used “in the performance of (African) xylophones, thumb pianos, plucked lutes, drum
chimes ... and the polyrhythmic methods of African instrumental music in general would form a good
basis for an African pianistic style.” Euba’s definition of African pianism has been mostly derived from
the works of composers south of the Sahara and, as noted by Burman-Hall the definition needs to be
modified in order to accommodate types of African pianism existing north of the Sahara. North African
pianism is exemplified in the works of Gamal Abdel-Rahim (1924-88) and of his compatriot Halim ElDabh, who is the subject of this paper. The focus of the paper will be on El-Dabh’s MEKTA’ IN THE
ART OF KITA’ (1955).
Orchestra Ethiopia 1963-1975: Halim El-Dabh – Catalyst for Music Innovation and Preservation
CYNTHIA TSE KIMBERLIN, Music Research Institute
Halim El-Dabh was invited by Haile Selassie I University and the Ethiopian government in 1961 to
teach, conduct research on Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Church music, and create a Pan-Ethiopian
ensemble known as Orchestra Ethiopia. Questions addressed aided by illustrations include: What kind
of environment set the stage for the creation of this Orchestra? Why was El-Dabh selected to create it
and what was its purpose? Why did the Orchestra garner praise, yet also court controversy? Who were
the Orchestra’s beneficiaries? Within the context of ye-bet agar (homeland), ye-wutch agar (diaspora),
and ye-sayber agar (cyberspace), what legacy did El-Dabh’s Orchestra leave?
Halim El-Dabh’s Opera Flies (1970-71)
DAVID BADAGNANI
Halim El-Dabh’s Opera Flies is one of the composer’s most striking works. Composed in response to
the Kent State tragedy of May 1970 (which El-Dabh experienced firsthand), it is an unconventional
opera, bringing its subject into relief through the use of metaphor and ritual rather than conventional
narrative. Its musical language is frequently avant-garde, integrating such diverse elements as
Ethiopian chant and West African drumming. Although Opera Flies remains unpublished and largely
unknown, it is historically significant and deserving of wider recognition. This paper examines the
background of the work’s composition, as well as its experimental musical and narrative structure.
4d Sexuality
Cleveland, Ohio
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Abstracts for Thursday afternoon—Sessions 5–6a
“Little Red Corvette” – Make-Out Mobile or Celestial Chariot? Religious Imagery and Sexual
Perversity in the Music of Prince
GRIFFIN WOODWORTH, University of California, Los Angeles
The interactions of sacred and profane elements in African-American musical genres has a long history,
but the manner in which Prince’s musical and lyrical evocations of religious devotion interact with his
complexly gendered sensuality go beyond the use of spiritual transcendence as a metaphor for sexual
release (and vice-versa), and approaches a very post-modern manipulation of signifiers. Within the
context of African-American religious history, the subject position of devout Christian would seem to
tether – if not entirely exclude – the type of polymorphous gender-play in which Prince engages, and
it is this apparent paradox that serves as the jumping-off point for my current study.
Bernstein’s Mass Appeal: Eclecticism, Omnivorism, Dirty Laundry, Musical Knowledge
NADINE HUBBS, University of Michigan
Biographers depict Bernstein the polymath, blurring boundaries of métier, high and low culture,
and more. All show him pursuing men and engaging, ambivalently, with women--without, however,
acknowledging differing sociocultural vectors. Evidently key in Bernstein’s 1951 marriage was his
ambition to succeed among conductors, “absolute monarchs, [permitted] anything . . . [if] protected
with a wedding ring.” Bernstein also reportedly outed Mitropoulos to the BSO board, setting the stage
for the NYPO’s sacking Mitropoulos in favor of his erstwhile protégé. Such private knowledge, “dirty
laundry,” exposes mechanisms of cultural production and thus merits scrutiny as cultural history and
musical knowledge.
The Birds and the Squirrels: Finding David Diamond in Copland’s Dickinson Songs
COLIN ROUST, University of Michigan
Each of the Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson (1950) is dedicated to a different “young composer
friend.” Though David Diamond, the dedicatee of the “Nature the Gentlest Mother,” has claimed that
he requested the poem Copland set for him, Phyllis Curtin has said, “The dedications are not idle.” My
analysis of the text setting and motivic content in the sketches and the published version of this song
argues that Copland intended the song specifically for the homosexual Diamond--not only to fulfill a
request, but also as a parental affirmation of love and acceptance, in spite of Diamond’s disaffection.
Thursday, ARSC Session, 3:15-5:30 p.m.
Cleveland and the Wider World
North Coast Jingles: The Career of a Commercial Composer in Cleveland
AMY WOOLEY, The College of William and Mary
From the 1960s to early 1980s, Dick Wooley had a highly successful career as a leading commercial
composer and producer in Cleveland. His jingles for products ranging from the local soft drink
company, Cotton Club, to the city of Cleveland itself became a lasting part of the local mass-media
soundscape. I will look at the commercial advertising and jingle industry in Cleveland, discuss the
anatomy of a successful jingle during this period, and talk about Cleveland Recording, the only
24-track studio operating in Cleveland at this time. I will introduce the composer himself, who
will discuss his techniques and dealings with the local musicians union and Cleveland Symphony.
The Cleveland-Chicago Nexus in Rhythm and Blues Recording in the Post World War II Era
ROBERT PRUTER, Lewis University
Cleveland had a large black population, and this community was vigorous in developing its own
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entertainment district, producing jazz, blues, and rhythm and blues acts for the world stage. But despite
possessing a rich entertainment culture, a broad array of media, and a large economic base, Cleveland
never developed a recording industry. On the other hand, 350 miles to the west was Chicago, with a
flourishing and long-productive recording industry. There thus developed a pipeline between Cleveland
and Chicago by which Cleveland talent flowed to Chicago for recording. This paper will explore that
nexus as it existed in the early post-World War II years.
POLKA, AND WHY IT’S GOOD FOR YOU
Dick Spottswood, Silver Spring, Maryland; JOE OBERAITIS, Orlando Florida; and LAURIE
GOMULKA PALAZZOLO, Farmington, Michigan
Remember when it used to be safe to deride jazz, country, and rhythm & blues as the musical equivalent
of something you scraped off your shoe? Well, they’ve all become academically respectable, and only
polka remains as the genre at which it’s safe to sneer. So here’s the bad news. Polka, the 160-year old gift
from central and eastern Europe to American musical life, is alive and thriving. Its artistry and resonance
stand on their own, rewarding expansive hearts and open minds with memorable music. And, of course,
you can still dance to it. Polka’s always been chic--you just didn’t know it! Join us, listen hard, and
maybe you’ll learn Polka’s Secret.
Thursday, SAM Session 5, 3:15 - 4:00 p.m.
5b Performance
“It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing”: The Evolution of Swing Dancing
RENEE CAMUS, Adelphi, Maryland
Swing Dancing is one of the more popular social dances today. Growing out of the 1920s Charleston,
swing dancing eventually achieved popularity with all classes and races. It continued to develop,
sprouting new and innovative variations on the original. Inspired by the proximity to the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame, this lecture/demonstration will show the development of swing dancing, examples
of its many variations, and their relation to different styles of music. The lecture will examine the
social climate in which these styles developed, and how it affected the form and steps of the dance.
Thursday, SAM Session 6, 4:15 - 5:45 p.m.
6a Musical Theater
You’re Doin’ Fine, Oklahoma!”: The Making of an Icon, 1943-1950
KATHERINE AXTELL, University of Rochester
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! occupies a prominent position in the written history of the
American musical theater. Richard Kislan, for example, states that “Oklahoma! was more than a
spectacular critical and popular success; it was a revolutionary manifesto that . . . raised the integrated
musical to the seat of power and influence” (Kislan 1995, p. 146). However, such hyperbole was largely
absent from Oklahoma!’s initial reviews; rather, the show’s reputation grew over time. This paper explores
critical commentary produced between 1943 and 1950 to reveal the multivalent historiographical process
through which Oklahoma! became a musical theater landmark .
Kurt Weill’s Love Life (1948) in a Comparative Analysis with Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins (1990)
LARA HOUSEZ, London, Ontario
Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s experimental vaudeville, Love Life, shares musical, structural, and
thematic similarities with Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins. Both musicals, written
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Abstracts for Thursday afternoon—Session 6b–c
forty-two years apart, also incorporate examples of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater. These striking parallels
not only suggest that Sondheim may have used Love Life as a model, but also expose a lacuna in the
literature on Weill and Sondheim. In comparing Love Life and Assassins, an attempt is made to present
Sondheim as an heir to Weill’s compositional throne.
Rodgers and Hart’s All Points West and Its Legacy
FELIX COX, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
Returning to New York after spending four years in Hollywood, Rodgers and Hart created a “serious”
piece for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra titled All Points West. In his autobiography, Rodgers
proclaimed the work “a faltering step in a basically right direction.” The evolution of the piece from
sketch to published score shows how Rodgers used phrase, cadence, form and key to build a cohesive
whole. Comparisons with “Soliloquy” from Carousel and the first act of South Pacific reveal how
these techniques developed in All Points West were applied in later works for the musical theater.
6b Black Female Jazz Performers and Musical Identity
“A Paradox in the Hubbub of Swing”: Maxine Sullivan and Black Musical Identity in the Swing Era
PATRICK BURKE, Washington University in St. Louis
This paper examines interactions between musical practices and ideas of racial authenticity by
considering the reception of Maxine Sullivan, an African American singer who became successful in
1937 with a swing version of the Scottish standard Loch Lomond. Although the seeming incongruity of
a black singer performing an ostensibly white song intrigued a large audience, it also led conservative
listeners to attack Sullivan’s performances as “sacrilegious.” While Sullivan’s example demonstrates
that black musicians could not fully escape dominant racial ideologies in the 1930s, it also reveals that
these performers found ways to suggest alternative notions of “authentic” black music.
Don’t Fence Me In!: The Effects of Race and Gender on the Shaping of the Image of Black Women
Jazz Instrumentalists
TAMMY KERNODLE, Miami University of Ohio
In the 1940s two of jazz’s most successful female pianists, Mary Lou Williams and Hazel Scott, were
booked indefinitely at New York’s most unique and controversial nightclub, Café Society. Both were
notable because of their approaches to the instrument. They would, however, become the source of
debate as the two were juxtaposed against one another as representations of “novel” and “serious” jazz
musicians. This presentation will examine how the politics of race and gender dictated the lives, and
careers of these two pianists and discuss how Barney Josephson, owner of Café Society, constructed
images of black womanhood through his interpretations of performance etiquette, stage presence and
repertoire.
The Many Voices of Sarah Vaughan
ELAINE HAYES, University of Pennsylvania
In November of 1953 vocalist Sarah Vaughan signed two contracts with Mercury Records – one with
Mercury to sing pop, and a second contract with their subsidiary label, EmArcy, to sing jazz. This paper
examines how this dual contract influenced public interpretations of Vaughan’s identity and subjectivity as
represented by her voice on sound recordings. Focusing on a pop single and jazz album, I explore the degree
to which each recording invoked a specific place or performing context, such as the home or nightclub, as
well as a relationship between voice and body, and how this was mediated by modern recording technology.
6c New York Experimentalism
A Big Noise for More to Hear: Bang on a Can and the Art of Audience Building
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Abstracts for Thursday afternoon—Session 6d; Session 6.5
MARGARET MARTIN, SUNY Stony Brook
Over the past 30 years numerous composers, musicians, and record labels have striven to expand the scope
of the American art music audience through a variety of musical, performative, and marketing methods.
Bang on a Can, a New York-based musical collective, encapsulates many of these developments; in
particular, its annual music festival offers a focused view of the group’s approach to audience cultivation.
This paper examines how Bang on a Can has attempted to construct and use its yearly festival to carve
out a broadly intellectual listenership for its members and contemporary art music.
Resisting the Airport: Bang on a Can Performs Brian Eno
CECILIA SUN, University of California, Los Angeles
In 1998, Bang on a Can transcribed and recorded Brian Eno’s ambient classic Music For Airports
(1978). The project transformed what was the result of Eno’s experimentations in the electronic studio
into a showcase for live virtuosos. In this paper, I use French anthropologist Marc Augé’s relatively
new idea of ‘Supermodernism’ in conjunction with architecture critic Charles Jencks’ more established
notion of ‘Late Modernism’ to argue that Bang on a Can¹s performance of Music for Airports changes
Eno’s quintessentially supermodernist sonic soundscape into an archetypal late-modernist phenomenon.
Downtown Overtones: Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, and the Art of the Guitar
CAROLINE O'MEARA, University of California, Los Angeles
In the late seventies, New York-based composers Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham were performing
in rock bands and writing works using rock instrumentation in larger formal contexts. In this paper, I
analyze Branca’s The Ascension (1981) and Chatham’s Drastic Classicism (1982), both scored for four
electric guitars, electric bass, and drums. These works explore the sonic effects of highly amplified
guitars tuned in very small intervals. In my analysis, I expose the composers divergent conceptions of
the electric guitar, American music history, and the relationship between rock and art music, particularly
within downtown New York¹s “borderline” music culture.
Friday, ARSC-SAM Session, 8:30 - 10:00 a.m.
Recording the History of Folk and Traditional Music
RON PEN, University of Kentucky, SAM Folk/Traditional Music Interest Group Chair
The history of recorded sound is inextricably intertwined with the preservation, presentation, and
transformation of folk and traditional music in the United States. The nascent recording industry created
commercial venues for traditional music with Mamie Smith’s release of Crazy Blues (1920) and Eck
Robertson’s Sally Goodin (1922). In addition to the commercial exploitation of traditional music, sound
recording also allowed collectors to record and preserve traditional music through documentary recordings.
Not long after Thomas Edison released the wax cylinder in 1878, people began documenting various
traditional music from Pennsylvania coal miners to Omaha Plains Indians. This session will create some
perspective on the history of recorded folk song. Panelists will include the following participants: Ronald
Cohen, Jeff Place, Chris Strachwitz, Kip Lornell, Dick Spottswood, and Ron Pen.
Friday, SAM Session 7, 8:30 - 10:10 a.m.
7b Film, Stage, and Tin Pan Alley
“Is He Charlie Chaplin?”: Cinematic Impersonation and Song on the American Stage
SCOTT D. PAULIN, Princeton University
For much of 1915, it was nearly obligatory for American vaudeville bills to feature some form
Cleveland, Ohio
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Abstracts for Friday morning—Session 7
of Charlie Chaplin imitation; other theatrical genres, including revues and musicals, also began
to interpolate Chaplin numbers, even Chaplin chorus lines. An embodied supplement to the film
images of Chaplin seems to have been desirable, especially at this watershed moment in American
entertainment, with cinema in ascendance over live performance. This obsession with performative
mimesis, especially as manifested in the act of song, suggests that Chaplin impersonators aspired
both to mimic the movies and to supply the living, audiovisual presence that movies lacked.
“I Think I’ve Got It!”: Tin Pan Alley Songwriters Through the Hollywood Lens
JENNIFER R. JENKINS, Columbia College Chicago
A spate of “biopics,” released by the major Hollywood studios in the 1940s-50s, purported to tell
the life stories of America’s greatest musical figures. As biography and as multimedia spectacle, the
effectiveness of these movies can be gauged in part by highlighting the use of works associated with
these musicians to manipulate the audience’s impressions of the lives of the people themselves. The
almost standardized scenario, underscored (literally) by key musical selections, suggests a number of
elements deemed important to the popular image of musical genius, qualities imperative to the tale
that the studios wished to tell and perhaps that the audiences wished to hear and see.
7c The Avant Garde in California and New York
John Cage and Narratives of American History
BENJAMIN PIEKUT, University of California, San Diego
This paper examines the statements of John Cage and his biographers to show how well-worn nationalist
tropes are used to create a place for Cage in the pantheon of American masters. I also examine the
contrasting celebrations of heterogeneity in his work, and use the composition, Apartment House
1776, to clarify his vision of American history. Introducing the key concept of agency leads to a
discussion of the difference between cosmetic multiculturalism and cultural pluralism in the work.
Reading accounts of Cageian diversity against the grain raises serious doubts about the composer’s
claims to cultural pluralism.
Lou Harrison and the Aesthetics of Revision
LETA E. MILLER, University of California, Santa Cruz
Lou Harrison was an inveterate self-borrower, continually revisiting old compositions to rescore,
update, or rework them. The process of revision also acted as a creative stimulus for Harrison: His
early works would reappear years later (sometimes drastically altered, sometimes barely changed)
alongside newly-composed movements, resulting in large-scale compositions with striking stylistic
contrasts. For Harrison, such diversity carried its own inherent logic: He strove to establish coherence
among disparate geographic and temporal sources of influence. That Harrison felt stimulated by his
earlier works suggests a linear developmental process; his style evolved by additions to, rather than
replacement of, prior interests.
Morton Feldman’s existentialist rhetoric and the authoring of avant-garde identity
BRETT BOUTWELL, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Scholarship on Morton Feldman has begun to unravel the composer’s numerous technical and
aesthetic borrowings from the visual arts. This presentation will expand the scope of this endeavor
by demonstrating Feldman’s participation in a cultural discourse that flourished within New York’s art
world during the 1950s and 1960s, one colored by the contemporary vogue of existentialist philosophy.
This discourse provides an historical context for the existentialist references that pepper Feldman’s
essays and lectures while shedding light on his conception of artistic subjectivity, on aspects of his
reception history, and on the social milieu with which he identified during the 1960s.
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Abstracts for Friday morning—Session 7c–8
Friday, ARSC Session, 10:15-12:30 p.m.
Personalities in American Music
Rediscovering George W. Johnson, The First African American Recording “Star”
TIM BROOKS, Greenwich, Connecticut
As the first black performer to gain fame through the phonograph, and the only prominent black in
the virtually all-white record industry of the 1890s, George W. Johnson holds a special fascination
for collectors and researchers. This presentation offers new research on him, including the story of
his 1899 trial for murder. Johnson’s career, the repertoire he recorded, and the manner in which it
was marketed paint a picture of black-white interaction at the dawn of recording. His success laid the
groundwork for later black artists, as detailed in my book Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the
Recording Industry.
Harry Belafonte and his Global Carnival
CARY GINELL, Origin Jazz Library, Thousand Oaks, California
In the 1950s and ‘60s, Harry Belafonte was one of the chief explorers of folk music traditions around the
world. Beginning as a jazz singer in New York nightclubs, Belafonte abruptly quit and began researching
folk music at the Library of Congress. His RCA Victor recordings of folk, blues, and work songs
from America, the West Indies, and elsewhere helped influence the burgeoning “folk music revival,”
although his overt commercialism prevented him from gaining appropriate credit from folk “purists.”
This presentation will attempt to examine Belafonte’s masterful work in bringing folk music of many
cultures to the American musical landscape.
Carmichael’s Hoagy: The Hidden Complexity Behind the Homespun Persona
SUZANNE MUDGE, Indiana University
Working his way from dance halls to Tin Pan Alley, radio, and Hollywood, Hoagland Howard Carmichael
developed a persona for himself as an easy-going, folksy musician. By the 1940s Hoagy had became one
of the best-known songwriters and performers in the country. Drawing on rare recordings and unpublished
papers from the Hoagy Carmichael Collection at Indiana University, I will look beyond Carmichael’s
well-crafted persona and talk about his versatility, tenacity, and creative drive. I will look specifically
at some of the ways Carmichael reworked unsuccessful compositions and refashioned himself as a
performer over time, ever conscious of his place in history.
Friday, SAM Session 8, 10:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
8a The “Deep Structures” of Charles Ives: Mental, Environmental, and Sentimental
Antimodernism, “The Celestial Railroad,” and the “Comedy” of Charles Ives
KARA ANNE GARDNER, University of San Francisco
Recent scholars have derided Charles Ives for misogyny and subjected him to psychoanalysis, but his
volatile character has not been adequately used to shed light on his compositional choices. Gayle Sherwood
has written an article that could reverse that trend. She argues that Ives suffered from nervous anxiety,
partly as a result of the modernization that took place in turn-of-the-century America. This paper takes up
where Sherwood left off. It looks at the way Ives’s concerns about urbanization and commercialization
influenced the “Comedy” movement of the Fourth Symphony, which was inspired by Hawthorne’s
antimodern allegory “The Celestial Railroad.”
Sylvan in the City: The Everyday Eternal in “Central Park in the Dark”
Cleveland, Ohio
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Abstracts for Friday morning—Session 8b-d
Around 1906 Charles Ives composed two pieces which he later paired as Two Contemplations:
“Central Park in the Dark (in the good ole Summer Time)” and “The Unanswered Question (A
Cosmic Landscape). According to Ives, the latter was “A Contemplation of a Serious Matter”
and the former “A Contemplation of Nothing Serious.” A careful reading of “Central Park,”
however, reveals that it is as “serious” as its more openly profound and meditative partner. The
two pieces are more alike than opposite in their generative ideas and ultimate execution. Using
sketches and their marginalia, and commentary by the composer, this paper considers the deep
structure of “Central Park in the Dark.” Ives’s “cartoon” or “take off” is a finely wrought
work wherein the composer, employing purely musical means, reconciles nature and the
city, and the everyday and the eternal.
Memory, Form, and Invention in Charles Ives’s Fourth Violin Sonata
THOMAS L. RIIS, University of Colorado, Boulder
This paper examines Ives’s Fourth Violin Sonata, a work hitherto viewed as a relatively simple
piece, to reveal its rich set of structural elements all resting on a subtle philosophical and religious
foundation. In the second movement, for example, pitch classes, motives, intervals, measure numbers,
tempi, and the registers of chord members are tightly linked together in symbolic numeric groups;
yet all is presented so unobtrusively that a first-time listener could be unaware of the care Ives so
clearly bestowed on it. The piece thus illustrates calmly and precisely what Ives meant when he
held up “substance” (an authenticity born of spiritual intensity) above “manner” (mere technique).
Charles Ives’s Simulacrum of Mental Life in Music
STUART FEDER, New York City
The same Zeitgeist that animated Freud’s concept of free association and William James’s stream of
consciousness engendered comparable innovations in the arts. Although the representation of such
mental processes has received scant attention in music, the works of Charles Ives provide a unique
opportunity. The quest for underlying formal principles in Ives has resulted in a compendium of Ives’s
compositional procedures. (Burkholder) In this paper an alternative and supplementary view of form
is suggested, namely, music as a semblance of the flow of mental life--in effect, a simulacrum. Among
the mental functions encoded are memory and reminiscence; vicissitudes such as intrusions, denial,
and distortion; and various affective states.
8b Jazz Now
Negotiating National Identity Among American Jazz Musicians in Paris
DAVID AKE, University of Nevada, Reno
Jazz emerged from the U.S., and many of its revered figures were born there. But the genre also
established early footholds in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere; and today, outstanding performers can be
found throughout the globe. Despite jazz’s worldwide presence, however, many writers continue to
tout it as “America¹s Music.” Given the web of locations and meanings enveloping this genre, it’s
worth exploring how national identity might operate among jazz performers and audiences. To that
end, this paper investigates the ways in which American jazz musicians in Paris today display, discard,
or otherwise represent “American-ness” through musical style, subjective identity, and professional
strategy.
Swing and Sehnsucht: Jazz after Postmodernism
DALE CHAPMAN, Mount Allison University
In recent years, writers, directors, musicians and thinkers have begun to put forth narratives that
challenge some of the inherited conventional wisdom surrounding postmodernism. The jazz world has
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Abstracts for Saturday morning—Session 9a
not remained untouched by these developments. In their music, both Brad Meldhau and Dave Douglas
renounce what they see as the information culture’s preoccupation with ironic playfulness and detachment.
“Swing and Sehnsucht” will explore the question of whether we can begin to speak of a new sensibility
in jazz distinct from what we understand as the postmodern.
Who Plays the Tune in “Body and Soul”?
JOSE ANTONIO BOWEN, Georgetown University
Jazz standards evoke different models of authority and identity than do Western musical works, and
European legal or phenomenological models often lead us astray. This paper explores the competing
authorities present in the transmission of Johnny Green’s “Body and Soul,” which arrived as a dozen
recorded versions (including one by Louis Armstrong) in 1930. An alteration in the first four notes of
the piece became authoritative, and its most popular recorded version (Coleman Hawkins 1939) contains
barely a reference to the original melody.
8c 19th Century Topics
Amy Beach, Robert Browning, and D. W. Griffith: Artists with one mind?
ADRIENNE FRIED BLOCK, Music in Gotham, Graduate Center, CUNY
Amy Beach’s song, “The Year’s at the Spring” (1899) embodies late nineteenth- century optimism. It is her
most successful song and the outstanding setting of an eight-line lyric excerpted from Robert Browning’s
long dramatic poem, “Pippa Passes.” Beach called the text “a burst of joy and faith.” Browning’s poem,
however, concerns the conflict between faith and religious belief, a subject that haunts much of his poetry.
Members of the many Browning clubs celebrated Beach’s song as one proof of the poet’s optimism. In
1909, Griffith turned the entire poem into a positive expression of faith by giving happy endings to its
tragic episodes. This paper investigates the readings and misreadings of the poem.
“Run … Run:” Appropriation and Re-appropriation from Slave Song to Neo-Nazi Propaganda
ANGELA HAMMOND, University of Kentucky
“Run Nigger, Run” was originally a text and tune commenting on nineteenth century slave patrols known
as paterollers. Through the examination of slave narratives, songsters, recordings, works of literature and
other accounts this paper addresses four things: 1) appropriation by African-Americans of “Run…Run,”
within the context of slave songs; 2) white re-appropriations via the minstrel show; 3) the textless fiddle
and banjo versions of the tune; and 4) related intertextual and intermusical tropes.
Confronting the Stereotypes, Confounding Cultural Hierarchy: An Unexplored Web of American
Musical Life, 1876-1880.
KATHERINE K. PRESTON, College of William and Mary
American musicians active on the late 19th-century stage moved from place to place and genre to genre
with an amazing alacrity. In this paper I focus on members of the Boston Ideal Opera Company, one of the
most popular and longest-lived English troupes of the period. The company itself attracted heterogeneous
audiences with its mixed repertory; its individual performers—when not singing opera—participated in a
wide range of performance activities. A close examination of these musicians’ jobs during 1876 through
1880 contradicts many unconscious and ingrained stereotypes about 19th-century music and musicians;
it furthermore reveals much about the rich, complex, and interconnected web that was the American
musical and theatrical world during the period.
8d Interest Group: Gender and Music
The Trouble with Minnie, Puccini’s Exotic American Heroine
ANNIE JANEIRO RANDALL, Bucknell University
Cleveland, Ohio
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Abstracts for Saturday morning—Session 9b
Puccini treated Belasco’s California as the exotic site for La Fanciulla del West (New York, 1910)
and viewed the western US’s play of race, ethnicity, class, and gender through the lens of opera’s
voyeuristic imperial gaze. US critics resisted seeing their countrymen portrayed as “them” in the
us/them formulation that lies at the heart of operatic exoticism; that Americans might be considered
comparable to Turks, gypsies, geishas, nubians, et. al., was anathema. This paper considers the
musico-dramatic function of the American Other (Native Americans, Mexicans, European Americans,
immigrants, and the unseen Chinese population) with particular attention to la fanciulla of the title.
Drawing from archival material and Puccini’s unpublished letters, I conclude that the opera’s tortured
reception stems largely from interpretive problems associated with the leading character, Minnie.
Towards a Framework for Examining “Blackness” in Opera
NAOMI ANDRE, University of Michigan
Considering operas by Verdi, Gershwin, and Krenek, I examine the ways in which racial difference
is depicted on the opera stage. Models in feminist musicology have provided a starting point for
framing issues related to “blackness” in opera. From my work on gender in early nineteenth-century
Italian opera, I find three areas of inquiry to be especially helpful: the physicality of the singer (black
bodies and blackfaced performers on stage), the structure of the plot and the identity of specific
singers (e.g., Leontyne Price). These parameters begin to construct a discourse on blackness in opera.
MeShell Ndegéocello: Musical Articulations of Black Feminism
MARTHA MOCKUS, SUNY Stony Brook
Although American bassist/singer/songwriter MeShell Ndegéocello expresses an ambivalent
relationship to feminism, much of her music enacts vigorous feminist critiques of capitalism, racism,
and homophobia. This paper analyzes three of her songs from Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape
(2002), drawing from theoretical work by Angela Davis and bell hooks. In “Dead Nigga Blvd”
Ndegéocello manipulates vocal “space” and the phenomenon of echo to critique the conflation of
freedom with capitalist consumption. “Hot Night” employs an unusual musical strategy of vocal
framing to engage a feminist critique of global capitalism. Finally, in “Barry Farms” Ndegéocello makes
compelling use of Go-Go style music to expose homophobic betrayal from within a queer relationship.
“B-Girl Stance in a B-Boy’s World”: DJ Kuttin Kandi, Hip-Hop Activist
ELLIE M. HISAMA, Brooklyn College & the Graduate Center, CUNY
While African American women and Latinas have begun to gain a toehold in the male-dominated
world of hip-hop, Asian American women are hard to find in mainstream accounts. This
paper examines the music of New York-based Filipina American DJ Kuttin Kandi, who challenges
stereotypes about Asian American women in hip-hop as a member of 5th Platoon and the Anomolies.
By considering Kuttin Kandi’s work as a turntablist and DJ, I suggest that hip-hop can be an
empowering medium for those women who confront the industry’s expectations about gender and race.
9a Interest Group: Gay/Lesbian
Gay Authorship and Music Historiography
HOWARD POLLACK, University of Houston
How does gay authorship effect the treatment of sexual orientation or the deciphering of homosexual
codes and subtexts? what are the strengths and pitfalls of gay authorship? can comparisons be drawn
to studies focussed on gender, race, ethnicity, religion, nationality? A few case studies – beginning
with Edward M. Maisel’s 1943 study of Charles Griffes – will be cited in order to elicit discussion of
such matters among the members of the society’s gay and lesbian study group.
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Abstracts for Saturday—Session 9d–12a
Friday Afternoon ARSC Session, 2:15-4:30 p.m.
A Recording History of the Cleveland Orchestra
DONALD ROSENBERG, Classical Music Critic for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and author of The
Cleveland Orchestra Story: "Second to None"
The rise of the Cleveland Orchestra from the industrial surroundings of a small Midwestern city to one
of the great orchestras in the world is a story of extraordinary events. It’s a tale of indomitable founders
like Adella Prentiss Hughes, the first woman to manage a symphony orchestra, and John L. Severance,
the wealthy industrialist after whom Severance Hall is named. It’s a drama of driven conductors like Artur
Rodzinski, who packed a loaded pistol during every performance, and George Szell, who is still renowned
for his precision. Musicians, managers, and patrons all played a role in making the orchestra *second to
none.* Excerpts of orchestra recordings will be played, beginning with the 1812 Overture recorded in 1924.
Recording the Cleveland Orchestra: It’s Not Your Father’s Severance Hall
ROBERT CONRAD, President of WCLV/WRMR and Producer and Commentator for The Cleveland
Orchestra Radio Broadcasts; and BRUCE GIGAX, Audio Supervisor for The Cleveland Orchestra
In 1965, WCLV and The Cleveland Orchestra became partners in an organization called The Cleveland
Orchestra Broadcast Service, a unique association between a commercial for-profit radio station and one
of the nation’s leading orchestras. The national broadcasts continued through 2002, making the network
the longest running orchestra broadcast series in the United States. As of 2003, national distribution ended
because of Orchestra budgetary problems. However, local broadcasts from Severance Hall continue over
WCLV. Since 1965, COBS has documented virtually every Orchestra concert at Severance Hall and the
Blossom Music Center as well as some tour concerts, during the reigns of four Music Directors-George
Szell, Lorin Maazel, Christoph von Dohnanyi, and Franz Welser-Moest, beginning with the Szell Shell
(installed in 1956) and continuing with the new shell of 2000. This re-constructed stage house, which
also includes the refurbished Norton Memorial Organ, provided new acoustics for musicians on stage, the
audiences in the hall and listening on the radio, and, of course, new recording challenges for the audio staff.
Friday Evening, ARSC Session 7:30-9:45 p.m.
A Celebration of Music from Cleveland
Singing ‘bout the Sixth City: Cleveland, Ohio, in Popular Song
WILLIAM L. SCHURK, Bowling Green State University
Whether it is the Cuyahoga River or Lake Erie, the Cleveland Browns or the Cleveland Indians, or even
the suburbs of Parma Heights and Euclid, a large body of popular songs and music about the one-time
“Sixth City” appeared on recordings during the last century. This presentation will make some sense of
this exciting town through recorded examples.
Rock ‘n’ Roll in Cleveland, Ohio
DEANNA R. ADAMS, Mentor, Ohio
In 1951, Cleveland deejay Alan Freed began spinning race records (music by black recording artists)
on his WJW-AM radio show. And he called it rock and roll. The following year, on March 21, 1952, he,
along with Record Rendezvous owner Leo Mintz and promoter Lew Platt, organized what became the
first-ever rock concert, the Moondog Coronation Ball at the Cleveland Arena. From that moment on,
Cleveland was the hub for anything rock ‘n’ roll and became a proving ground for hundreds of superstars
Cleveland, Ohio
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Abstracts for Friday afternoon
in the making. In her audio/visual presentation, Deanna R. Adams, author of Rock ‘ n’ Roll and the
Cleveland Connection will demonstrate why Cleveland is indeed the home of this music genre.
“Polka Capital”? “Home of Rock ‘n’ Roll”? “Little Nashville”?—A Cultural and Ethnic History of
Recording in Cleveland
SUSAN SCHMIDT HORNING, Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Institute of Art
Cleveland’s musical identity has long been linked to its title as the “rock ‘n’ roll capital of the world.”
But long before disc jockey Alan Freed popularized the music with his “Moondog’s Rock ‘n’ Roll
Party” on WJW radio, Cleveland saw recording activity dating back to the 1920s. This paper explores
the efforts of radio-amateurs-turned-recording-enthusiasts who turned their passion for sound into
successful business endeavors during the booming postwar years, when magnetic tape revolutionized
the recording industry, radio and, TV advertising exploded, and baby-boomers grabbed electric guitars
and spent their hard-earned money on the all-important demo record.
SATURDAY, ARSC-SAM Session 8:30 - 10:00 a.m.
Collections and Archiving
The Difference Is in the Moan: The Growing Pains of the Starr-Gennett Collections
ELIZABETH SURLES, Starr-Gennett Foundation
The Starr-Gennett Foundation, incorporated in 1991, struggles to grow as a collecting organization.
“The Difference Is In The Moan” (a word-play on Gennett Records’ slogan, “The Difference Is In
The Tone”) chronicles the Starr-Gennett Foundation’s growing pains as it continues to develop and
preserve its collection. Issues with the Foundation’s nascent collection include: purpose of collection,
establishment of collection and material sources, preservation of materials with limited resources,
access to materials with donated facilities, the importance of partnerships, policy development, and
working with volunteers.
Josiah K. Lilly and the Foster Hall Recordings
MARIANA WHITMER, University of Pittsburgh
Josiah K. Lilly, founder of the Foster Hall Collection, commissioned the Foster Hall Recordings, to
make available all of the music of Stephen Foster, much of which had never been recorded, and hasn't
since. This collection of 96 long-playing discs, recorded between 1934 and 1937, reveals important
information about Lilly, the growth of the collection, and the recording process that took place at the
Gennett Recording Laboratory in Indianapolis. The performers' names have long since faded into
obscurity, yet their talented renditions remain a testament to the enduring quality of Foster's music, as
will become evident from recorded examples.
Herbert Elwell, Leonard Shure, and Mary Simmons: Classical Music in Cleveland in the Mid-20th
Century
MARC BERNSTEIN, Toronto, Canada
The mid-20th century was an active period for classical musicians living in Cleveland-including
soprano Mary Simmons, pianist Leonard Shure, and composer, critic, and teacher Herbert Elwell.
Excerpts will be played from *The Forever Young: A Ritual for Solo Voice and Orchestra* composed
by Herbert Elwell for Mary Simmons in 1953 and from Schubert’s *Die Winterreise* performed by
Mary Simmons and Leonard Shure at Severance Hall’s chamber music hall in 1954. Elwell’s papers,
scores, and recordings can be found in Special Collections at the Cleveland State University Library.
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Abstracts for Saturday morning—Session 12b–c
Saturday, SAM Session 10: 8:30 - 10:00 a.m.
10b African-American Art Music in the 1930s
Representing America, Instructing Europe: The Hampton Choir On Tour
LAWRENCE SCHENBECK, Spelman College
In 1930, American philanthropists financed a European tour by the Hampton Institute Choir. They hoped
to convince colonial powers that Africans possessed unique cultural gifts but could also absorb the best
European traditions: the Hamptonians’ polished presentations seemed perfect for the task. Yet conflicts
arose. Hampton administrators worried about alienating white supporters or “spoiling the Hampton
atmosphere.” Conductor Nathaniel Dett wanted to showcase Gretchaninoff, while his handlers urged
him to program more “authentic” folk material. Fashionable primitivist iconography was used to market
the group. Competing visions of American music—and America—shaped every step of the choir’s
journey.
The Life and Music of Black Creek American Contemporary Composer Zenobia Powell Perry: Race,
Ethnicity and Gender Issues in American Music Biography
JEANNIE GAYLE POOL
Born in 1908 in Boley, Oklahoma, to a black physician father and a Creek Indian mother, Ohio composer
Zenobia Powell Perry studied with R. Nathaniel Dett, Cortez Donald Reece, William L. Dawson, Allan Willman, and Darius Milhaud. Having taught at black universities for more than five decades, she is a formidable
role model for all who desire to have a career in music while facing challenges related to race, ethnicity, and
gender. Perry’s story bears witness to a century during which tremendous strides were made towards equality, while raising many complex and unresolved issues related to blacks with native American heritage.
10c 1972
Free to Be…What you Want Me to Be: Folk Music and Gendered Identity Formation in 1970s
Popular Children’s Music
YARA SELLIN
When Marlo Thomas created the album Free to Be... You and Me in 1972, she produced a propagandafilled soundtrack that evoked the politicized folk tradition of the 1950s and 1960s. The album stands up
as a remarkable cultural artifact, one that reveals the preoccupations of its creators-white, middle-class
feminists. bell hooks has problematized this particular strain of feminism, claiming that its proponents
ignore issues of class and race in the interests of developing careers and moving outside the home .
Continuing hooks’ argument, I show that Free To Be ultimately promotes a culturally white and essentially
suburban model of childhood, and a hetero-normative model of adulthood.
“Cosmic American Music”: Country Rock and the Myth of Gram Parsons
OLIVIA CARTER MATHER, University of California, Los Angeles
Recent interest in “roots music” has led to a search for the progenitors of “alternative country,” often
traced to Gram Parsons (1946-1973), a Southern-born singer/songwriter and member of the Byrds. Since
his death, critics, fans, and musicians have dubbed Parsons the inventor of “country rock” – a term he
hated, preferring “cosmic American music.” This paper will evaluate narratives about Parsons’s music
and significance, proposing that while he was an instigator of the style, he was one part of a burgeoning
roots scene in southern California that was equally responsible for country rock.
Session 11 SAM Plenary Session
Teaching Controversial Aspects of American Music: A Panel Discussion
JAMES DEAVILLE, McMaster University, Moderator
Cleveland, Ohio
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Abstracts for Saturday morning—Session 12c–d
The minstrel show, gangsta rap, Eminem, Showboat. All of these American musics have been the
source of considerable controversy because of associations with racism, misogyny, homophobia,
profanity, and/or violence. Teaching this “material” in post-secondary institutions is often regarded as
transcending the traditional boundaries of appropriateness within the academy, A teacher’s decision to
include the topic in a course on American music runs the risk of offending students and facing censure
by the university administration. Yet each of the musics indicated above represents an important
moment in the history of American music, reflecting major issues within the society of the time. It
is crucial that we engage students and colleagues in a productive dialogue about the controversial
aspects of what we perform and study. Recognizing the difficulty yet importance of the task, our
panel intends to provide insights into how we as teachers can accomplish that in the classroom. The
result will be an open and frank discussion about issues that all too rarely enter public discourse.
Saturday, ARSC Session, 10:15-11:45 a.m.
New World and Telarc
The New World Records Story
DAVID HAMILTON, The Juilliard School
New World Records, a non-profit record company dedicated to American music, began as a project
of the Rockefeller Foundation to celebrate the 1976 bicentennial. This involved the publication and
distribution of 100 LPs of re-issued and newly recorded music, covering a wide range of art and
vernacular idioms from two centuries. The success of the project led to its continuation as an independent
label that, having survived amid the industry’s hard times, is currently developing an online database
of American music recordings (in collaboration with the Mellon Foundation and NYU) and absorbing
and reviving the catalogue of Composers Recordings Inc.
The Telarc Story-From Direct-to-Disc and the Cleveland Orchestra*to DSD*and Beyond
JACK RENNER, Chairman and Chief Recording Engineer, Telarc; and ROBERT WOODS, President
and Senior Producer, Telarc
Although it began as a classical-only recording company in 1977, Telarc International now boasts a
catalog of more than 600 recordings, ranging from classical, classical-crossover, jazz, contemporary
jazz, and blues. The company releases close to fifty-five recordings each year, working with a
distinguished roster of artists and backed by an outstanding staff of more than fifty employees in its
Cleveland-based headquarters. Who and what enabled this comparatively small, independent American
company to achieve this revered position? Learn how is it still successfully challenging the majors in
the recording industry and what is it doing to keep its leading edge.
Saturday, ARSC Session, 1:00-2:30 p.m.
Recorded Sound: History and Science
Dayton C. Miller: The Clevelander Who Knew All About Sound Recording
GEORGE BROCK-NANNESTAD, Patent Tactics, Denmark
From 1905 to 1941 D.C. Miller was synonymous with US knowledge in the field of musical acoustics
and his work was comparable to the most important European contributions. Needless to say, most
acoustic sound recording was performed in the record companies, but their results were commercial
secrets at the time. I will present Miller’s systematic work in acoustic sound recording and contrast
it to the published work of other researchers. Some of his original material has survived and it gives
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Abstracts for Saturday afternoon—Session 12d–13a
an interesting insight, not only into the problems of acoustic sound recording, but also into the working
of his mind.
The Radio: Recorded vs. Live Paradigm
JAMES R. POWELL, JR., Gramophone Adventures, Portage, MI
Phonograph records were used in early radio broadcasts then became disfavored as live entertainment was
deemed more realistic. Electrical transcriptions designed to sound like live broadcasts started to be used
in the late 1920s-early 1930s. This presentation will feature a demonstration of electrical transcription
samples from 1927 to 1969, including early radio recordings, the Western Electric wide range system,
Orthacoustic lacquer cuts, as well as European and American tape recordings. The audience may judge
which recordings sound “live.”
Saturday, ARSC Session 2:30 - 4:00 p.m.
Magnetic Tape Restoration and Transfer
Moderator: Gary Galo, Crane School of Music, SUNY Potsdam; ARSC Technical Committee, CoChair
Panelists: Adrian Cosentini, VidiPax, New York, NY; Joseph Patrych, Patrych Sound Studios, Bronx,
NY; Dennis Rooney, New York, NY; Jon M. Samuels, Recorded Legacy, New York, NY; Seth B.
Winner, Rodgers and Hammerstein Archive, NYPL, Seth B. Winner Sound Studios, Inc., ARSC
Technical Committee Co-Chair.
Saturday, SAM Session 12, 1:15 - 3:15 p.m.
12a Film Music
Seen From the Street: Hollywood Underscoring, Urban Modernity, and Alfred Newman’s “Street
Scene”
MATTHEW MALSKY, Clark University
Between 1931 and 1953, no fewer than seven Hollywood films were underscored using the same orchestral
music: Alfred Newman’s “Street Scene”. Running the genre gamut from realist drama to film noir to
romantic comedy, all of these films prominently featured New York City, with a distinctly American form
of vernacular musical modernism. This paper will examine the persistence of this semiotic equation that
illustrates that an urban location is at the center of modernity itself, and confirms the connection between
public life and the psychoanalytic register that in Lacan’s late writing is called the symbolic order.
The Performance of Assimilation: Power and Commerce in Cuban Love Song
JONATHAN GREENBERG, University of California, Los Angeles
Read in light of the historic popularity of its central musical number, MGM’s 1931 film Cuban Love
Song becomes the fictional story of the genesis of “El manisero,” the song that only a year earlier had
kicked off the first Latin music craze in the U.S. In depicting this hit in a pre-commercial setting, and
setting up its popularity in the U.S., the movie creates a mythology about the migration of Cuban music
into the North American market. In particular, Lawrence Tibbett’s operatic singing invokes a discourse
of highbrow culture that was important to colonialism.
“The Good Fight”: Blitzstein, Thomson, and Musical Incongruity in The Spanish Earth
CAROL A. HESS, Bowling Green State University
Cleveland, Ohio
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Abstracts for Saturday afternoon—Session 13b–14b
Musical reaction in the U. S. to the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) has never been comprehensively
studied, despite the activities of many left-leaning composers and performers on behalf of the Spanish
Republic. A compelling case is Joris Ivens’s 1937 film The Spanish Earth, for which Marc Blitzstein
and Virgil Thomson selected music from recorded folklore collections. Many of their choices seem
arbitrary both in relation to the images on the screen and to historical reality. Yet even the most
incongruous selections reveal multiple layers of meaning that comment on the war–the Good Fight–in
ways Blitzstein and Thomson probably never imagined.
Aaron Copland and the Aesthetics of Hollywood
Given as a guest lecture for Columbia University’s History of the Motion Picture course at New
York’s Museum of Modern Art in January of 1940, an unpublished talk by Copland reveals his
initial, informal reactions to Hollywood’s prevailing “systems” of composition and explains his own
compositional approach to film. These ideas lie behind the well-known conclusions given in the
“Film Music” chapter of his best selling music guidebook What to Listen For in Music. This paper
explores the aesthetic debates informing Copland’s film music and critical writings with a focus
on his music for The City (1939) and Of Mice and Men (1939). Copland functions as an aesthetic
traveler connecting the soundscapes of Hollywood film with New York’s concert hall. In the process
he reveals clues to his working methods that help to explain his effectiveness as a composer for film
as well as his frustrations.
12b Opera
Caruso and His Cousins: Portraits of Italian Americans in the Operatic Novelty Songs of Edwards
and Madden
LARRY HAMBERLIN, Brandeis University
In the early years of the twentieth century, the proponents of opera as high art were challenged by
the unrefined but enthusiastic Italian immigrants crowding the galleries of the Metropolitan Opera
House. Documenting this confrontation were comic songs that comment satirically on the star status
of Caruso and Tetrazzini and on the aspirations of would-be Italian American opera singers. Beyond
their still-considerable entertainment value, the “operatic novelties” of Gus Edwards and Edward
Madden shed light on opera reception in the United States during opera’s transition from an art of the
people to the reserve of a cultivated elite.
“Who wants real? I want magic!” Musical Madness in André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire
NICHOLE MAIMAN, University of Maryland
In André Previn’s operatic adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche
Dubois is depicted as a character driven mad by her own desperate cries for human affection and
acceptance. Her façade as the traditional Southern belle eventually leads to her mental breakdown
as she attempts to find a good man to save her from a sordid sexual past. Through a dramatic
and musical examination of Previn’s opera – including an analysis of the composer’s use of
leitmotives – I explore Blanche’s operatic madness in order to greater highlight her mental decline.
12d Contemporary Popular Musics
Dance Dance Revolution, Cyber-Dance Communities, and Musical Taste
JOANNA DEMERS, University of Southern California
In Dance Dance Revolution (DDR), an arcade and home video game distributed by the Japanese
entertainment corporation, Konami, players move their feet in specific patterns set to electronic dance
music. Only by achieving a high accuracy rate can a player advance from one level to the next. DDR
enjoys worldwide popularity among teenagers and young adults, partially due to the marketing of the
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Abstracts for Saturday afternoon—Session 14b–14d
game’s “soundtracks” as separate, purchasable collections of underground techno, house, and drum ‘n’
bass. This paper considers the many internet communities of DDR fans and their debates concerning
“mainstream” culture and musical taste.
Changing Wigs: Subcultural Dynamics and Performance Practices in the Southern California Metal
Tribute Scene
GLENN T. PILLSBURY, University of California, Los Angeles
Occupying a unique nexus between the performative and the recorded—between the choreographed
spontaneity of live concerts and the private realm of recordings as “text”—tribute bands represent a latemodern search for stable authenticity in a hyper-mediated world that emphasizes constant change and
fragmentation. Metal tribute bands, such as the Southern California Metallica tribute band Creeping Death,
present a particularly compelling backdrop to explore diverse musical-social issues such as music and
place, genre and musical complexity, and the ever-developing personalized relationship between fandom and
history. As such, they also offer a window into the infrequently studied area of popular music and maturity.
Hand Jive and Ear Prudence
WALTER EVERETT, University of Michigan and JOHN COVACH, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill
Aspects of modern pop and rock music are often attributed to convenient hand position (“those parallel
chords are simply a product of barre chords on the guitar!”) without a thought to underlying tonal relations
that are guided by the composer’s ear. Today’s presentation will attempt to address possible ways by which
we may compare characteristics of guitar, keyboard and vocalization techniques, as heard in well-known
examples of American pop-rock music, in the hope that rock researchers will no longer talk past each other
when some are attuned to performance-based compositional method and others, instead, to musical function.
12d Student Forum Panel: Teaching American Music
This panel will provide a self-reflective forum for our community of scholars to share practical
and philosophical insights regarding what we do on a day to day basis: teaching American Music.
Conceived especially with graduate students in mind, we hope to create a space in which ideas
about music, scholarship, methodologies, and classroom strategies can be exchanged, discussed,
shaped, and passed on to the up and coming generation of American Music scholars and teachers.
Saturday, SAM Session 13, 3:30 - 4:00 p.m.
13a Performance
Two Gems of Ohio: Julia Perry and Zenobia Powell Perry
SEBRONETTE BARNES, Cheyney University of Pennsylvania
Julia Perry (1924-1979) and Zenobia Powell Perry (1908-2004) represent the second generation of
composers who fused their African-American musical heritage and Western European training. Julia
lived in Akron, Ohio as a child and enjoyed a career that included studying and performing in Europe.
The recipient of two Guggenheim fellowships, her songs give way to both black idioms and traditional
European practices. Zenobia Perry’s songs are a study of poetry in motion for they reflect the influence
of black American and native American folklore and her original flare and appreciation of language.
She died on January 17th in Xenia, Ohio.
13b: Performance
Like Brothers: The Music of Ernst Bacon and Otto Luening
HARLIE SPONAUGLE, Arlington, Virginia
Cleveland, Ohio
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Abstracts for Sunday morning—Session 15a–b
On Ernst Bacon’s death, Otto Luening wrote these words of consolation to his widow: “We were, of course,
more like brothers than anything else; our backgrounds and aims were similar.” Bacon (1898-1990) and
Luening (1900-1996) met in their early twenties, and forged a musical and spiritual kinship that lasted the
rest of their lives. This lecture-recital mines the bounty of their extensive song literature and demonstrates
why the works of these two quintessentially American composers should be performed more widely.
Sunday, ARSC Session, 8:30-10:15 a.m.
Record Companies: The Ohio Influence
James Andem and the Ohio Phonograph Company
PATRICK FEASTER, Indiana University; and DAVID N. LEWIS, All Music Guide
We will give a preliminary assessment of the work of James L. Andem, the entrepreneur responsible
for promoting the phonograph in late nineteenth-century Ohio. Andem entered the business through his
interest in court reporting, but in the entertainment field his company pioneered the “phonograph arcade”
and produced the “Pat Brady” series of Irish comedy cylinders. When the North American Phonograph
Company collapsed, Andem charted an independent course, publishing the Edison Phonographic News
as an industry trade journal and expanding his operations into Indiana and Illinois. Later, Andem gained
notoriety by seeking to enforce franchise contracts from the North American period.
“The King of Them All”—Syd Nathan and the Rise and Fall of King Records (Cincinnati, Ohio)
BEN GRILLOT, VidiPax, New York
King Records, founded in Cincinnati in 1943 by a frustrated jazz drummer named Syd Nathan, was
one of the most important independent American labels of the mid-20th century, recording musicians
ranging from James Brown to Cowboy Copas. Nathan recognized the growing demand for both R&B
and country music among a population that was moving to factory jobs in the North. This presentation
will trace the origins of King Records, explore the stories behind some of it’s biggest stars and songs,
discuss Syd Nathan’s unscrupulous business practices, and conclude with a discussion of the label’s
dissolution and legacy.
Cleveland and Its Role in the Birth of the DIY Recording Industry
PAUL MAROTTA, New World Records
Between 1974 and 1983 Cleveland was home to numerous record labels. Hearthan, Mustard, Drome,
Neck, and Terminal, among others, produced the first U.S. recordings of what would soon be called
“DIY” (Do It Yourself). Groups such as The Electric Eels, Mirrors, Devo, Pere Ubu, The Styrenes,
The Pagans, were the pioneers of a movement that by the ‘80s produced thousands of releases each
year. Many of these early Cleveland recordings remain in print. This talk will provide a comprehensive
overview of the labels and their releases, the artists and their musical vision, the studios and producers,
methods of distribution, and contemporary press and critical response.
Sunday, SAM Session 14, 9:00 - 10:30 a.m.
14a Mexican, Cuban, and African Inspirations
Revueltas, The Chicago Years (1919-1925)
ROBERT PARKER, Coral Gables, Florida
1919 to 1925 were formative years for Mexican composer and violinist Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940).
He enrolled in the Chicago Musical College in January 1919 and worked in theatre orchestras to support
his wife and daughter. During a 1924 visit to Mexico his composition production was influenced by
54
Abstracts for Sunday morning—Session 15c
Carlos Chávez and the avant garde music Chávez espoused. In March 1925 he left Chicago to rejoin the
Chávez coterie in Mexico. The Chicago years prepared Revueltas for the professional life that followed
in San Antonio and Mobile, leading to his ultimate success in Mexico in the 1930s.
Ernesto Lecuona’s Danzas Afrocubanas and the Mechanics of Stylization
ERICA SCHEINBERG, University of California, Los Angeles
The middlebrow composer Ernesto Lecuona published his Danzas Afrocubanas in 1930, a set of stylized
piano pieces that mimic various Afrocuban dance genres and depict the moving bodies of Afrocuban
dancers. Lecuona’s virtuosic music seems to enforce rigorous discipline and mechanical motion upon
both the performing pianist and the imagined Afrocuban subjects he or she programmatically invokes.
This paper seeks to contextualize Lecuona’s Afrocuban Dances within several stylistic and ideological
movements: the turn-of-the-century ragtime craze, traditions of nationalist Cuban salon music, and piano
pieces by European Modernist composers such as Ravel and Stravinsky that conflate the “primitive”
with the mechanical.
“Afrikanische Musik in New York City:” Steve Reich and the Africanization of American Art Music
MARTIN SCHERZINGER, Eastman School of Music
Steve Reich’s musical oevre is fundamentally beholden to African musical practices and forms. Yet,
for most commentators, Reich’s music refers less to the thematic recall of African textures and tunes
themselves than to the formal assemblage and rearrangement of their abstract elements: in short, the
aesthetics of “minimalism”. This paper traces Reich’s African citations to specific source materials;
describes the original functions and contexts of the borrowed music (even if they are not demonstrably
known by Reich); and, finally, assesses the ideological dimensions implicit in the way the African
materials are put to use in an American context.
14b Song in the 1930s
The Poisonous Idyll: Hanns Eisler and the Hollywood Songbook
MARGARET JACKSON, Florida State University
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood, California served as a refuge for disenfranchised European
musicians seeking safety from National Socialism and a devastating world war. Among these was communist
composer Hanns Eisler. While in the U.S., Eisler worked on The Hollywood Songbook, a collection of
fifty songs with German and English texts. These songs suspended the composer between two worlds: his
German homeland and his adopted country, the United States. The Hollywood Songbook offers a window
into a time and place in which the American landscape served as both a haven for displaced artists and an
oppressive idyll whose climate, language, people, and politics reinforced deeply-rooted immigrant isolation.
Delivering Miss Otis’s Regrets: Performers and Arrangers Tackle Cole Porter’s Tale of an Unlikely
Lynching
TODD DECKER, University of Michigan
Cole Porter composed “Miss Otis Regrets (She’s Unable to Lunch Today)” (1934) when national
awareness of lynching was at its zenith. The lyric, in which the singer narrates the lynching of a white
woman, is structured around disturbing reversals of race, class, and gender. The seventy-year performance
history of the song, as captured on over fifty recordings, offers examples of how popular music has
sung America’s unspeakable history. Listening to the “Miss Otis Regrets” discography allows one to
hear how performers and arrangers can ignore, neutralize, or trivialize meaning in a troublesome text.
Every Love but True Love: Unstable Relationships in Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale”
MICHAEL BUCHLER, Florida State University
Cleveland, Ohio
55
In the thirties, Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale” was better known for its lyrics than for its music. This
song about prostitution, with its references to soiled love and the price of paradise, was famously
banned in Boston and even raised a few eyebrows on Broadway. I will demonstrate some ways in
which Porter musically depicted his tawdry lyrics, coupling ambiguous and non-functional harmonic
structures with disguised and incomplete contrapuntal lines. For comparison, portrayals of “true love”
in two of Porter’s more normative torch songs will also be considered.
14c Reception Issues
“Show Them What Bad Music Is”: The American Premiere of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony
No. 1, Op. 9
JAMES M. DOERING, Randolph-Macon College
In spring of 1915, Leopold Stokowski announced plans to conduct the American premiere of Schoenberg’s
Chamber Symphony No. 1. His decision was a gamble: at the time of the announcement he hadn’t heard
the work nor seen the score. He simply needed a novelty for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s upcoming
season. A month later, the score arrived, and Stokowski was baffled. He privately declared the piece
“ridiculous” and sought to cancel the premiere. Orchestra manager Arthur Judson suggested that perhaps
they could use the work “to show audiences what bad music is.” Stokowski agreed. What resulted was
a public relations campaign to prepare Philadelphians for difficult modern music, both good and bad.
Looking for High Modernism in 1920s Los Angeles
CATHERINE PARSONS SMITH, University of Nevada Reno
By the time the first concert series in Los Angeles devoted to high modernism (Evenings on the Roof)
got started (1939), several such series had come and gone in New York, the journal Modern Music
was well into its second decade, emigre Arnold Schoenberg was ensconced at UCLA, and the Los
Angeles-as-musical-vacuum myth was well established. In this paper I document appearances of high
modernism in LA from 1919 and the opposition that arose c.1926. The increasing hostility was grounded
in local and national cultural issues as well as in the changing face of ultramodernist music itself.
Towards a Reception History of Gershwin’s Concerto in F, 1925-1937
TIMOTHY FREEZE, University of Michigan
Drawing evidence from the scrapbooks in the Gershwin Collection at the Library of Congress
and in the Whiteman Collection at Williams College, this paper sketches a reception history of
Gershwin’s Concerto in F from the work’s première in 1925 to the composer’s death in 1937. An
analysis of the concerts and their reviews shows how differences in program, venue, and geography
led to many conflicting opinions of the Concerto among both audiences and critics, giving the
modern scholar a window onto the interaction between the classical and popular in music of the
1920s and 1930s.
14d Interest Group: Connecting Outside the Academy
JOSEPH HOROWITZ, chair.
The four presenters will describe opportunities and pitfalls when scholars link with institutions outside
the academy. DALE COCKRELL will discuss a forthcoming “Dvorak in America” festival partnering
Vanderbilt University with the Nashville Symphony, and including an evening exploring the trajectory
of African-American song through Foster, Dvorak, Burleigh, and Cook. MARK CLAGUE will discuss
a forthcoming MUSA edition of Copland’s film score for “The City” and its application to a planned
Naxos DVD series of American documentary films with newly recorded scores. DEANE ROOT
will discuss the scholar-teacher interaction in creating and implementing “Voices Across Time” for
American schools.
56
ARSC Session, 10:30 a.m. - 12:00 noon
Funk, Punk, and the Blues
The Dayton Funk Movement: Midwife to the Birth of Album-Oriented Black Pop
JASON HOUSLEY, Indiana University
Dayton, Ohio was teeming with musical talent during the 1970s and 80s. The Dayton band known as
the Ohio Players helped to popularize urban funk with pop/rock audiences and achieved both R&B
and pop success. Soon, more Dayton funk bands would emerge just as black music was making the
transformation from a singles-oriented industry to one that concentrated on the long-play albums format.
As funk became the preeminent black musical style of the late 1970s, Dayton groups made a significant
contribution to America’s musical landscape.
Ain’t It Fun Knowing You’ll Never Be Number One: Ohio Artpunk 1972-1987
DAVID N. LEWIS, All Music Guide
“Ain’t It Fun Knowing You’ll Never Be Number One” deals with the early history of Ohio underground
rock music recordings. This represents a large and varied body of mostly undocumented work; far more of
it survives in the form of homemade cassette recordings than as issued records. Ohio made some serious
impact on popular music in this period, yet the records remain obscure and the cassette tapes continue
to deteriorate. I plan to make an appeal for preservation of these recordings and to advocate for the need
to evaluate regional recorded legacies of the recent, but not immediate, past.
Red, White, and Whose Blues? Questions of Authenticity, Appropriation and Identity from 1950-2003
ROBERTA FREUND SCHWARTZ, University of Kansas
The popularity of the blues with white audiences has generated concerns that the music has lost its
force as a serious expression of African American culture. Many fear that the blues has been adopted
as a “feel-good” gesture of racial inclusion and the “authenticity” of the form has been compromised.
These concerns are not new. In both the late 1940s and early 1960s, British critics and fans discussed
the implications of commercialization and appropriation of the blues. Over time the standards of what
constitutes “authentic” blues have shifted, but the central argument remains: under what conditions
should the music survive?
SAM Session 15, 10:45 - 12:15 p.m.
15a Performances
Songs by Cleveland Composers
STEPHANIE TINGLER, University of Georgia, and WILLIAM OSBORNE, Denison University
Arthur Shepherd (1880–1958) served as assistant conductor and program annotator of The Cleveland
Orchestra, taught at Western Reserve University and wrote criticism for the Cleveland Press. Herbert
Elwell (1898–1974) taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music, served as program annotator for The
Cleveland Orchestra and wrote criticism for the Plain Dealer. James H. Rogers (1857–1940) served
several Cleveland temples and churches as organist, taught at the Cleveland School of Music, and founded
his own music publishing house. Ernest R. Ball (1878–1927), the only Cleveland native of our quartet,
trained at the Cleveland Conservatory of Music before moving to New York, where he established a
considerable reputation in part by writing Irish songs for performers like John McCormack. His songs
were also employed by crooners like Rudy Vallee and Roy Rogers. However, he proclaimed in a song
of 1918 that “I’m from Ohio,” and is buried in Cleveland’s Lakeview Cemetery,
Normand Lockwood’s Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
Cleveland, Ohio
57
KAY NORTON, Arizona State University, the University Singers of the University of Alabama,
GREGORY R. GENTRY, University of Alabama, Director
Following a three-year apprenticeship with Nadia Boulanger (1925-28) and his Rome Prize residency
in Italy (1929-32), composer Normand Lockwood (1906-2002) began his long and productive academic
career with an appointment at Oberlin College. The College’s strong choral tradition inspired some of
Lockwood’s best-remembered works, including Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, winner of the
1939 G. Schirmer “World’s Fair Prize.” Lockwood’s vibrant, evocative setting of the Whitman poem
features close-position choral sonorities and understated mood and text painting. This performance
by the University of Alabama’s premiere choral ensemble will be conducted by Gregory Gentry. Kay
Norton, author of a 1993 life-and-works monograph on Lockwood, will provide brief commentary.
15b Jazz Then
Borrowed Memories of the American South: Music, Imagination, and Cultural Identity in Duke
Ellington’s Deep South Suite
ANDREW BERISH, University of California, Los Angeles
Based in New York City, but more often a resident of the road, Duke Ellington was a musician preoccupied
with place. The bandleader’s 1946 composition Deep South Suite opens for the listener an imaginary
photo album of carefully constructed Southern impressions. Through a close reading of the final
movement of the suite, “Happy-Go-Lucky-Local,” I will explore how the Ellington Orchestra’s imaginary
evocation of this place is a search for an African-American identity that can balance the local and the
national, the great diversity of the American landscape with the need for a cohesive larger community.
Jelly Roll Morton and the Spanish Tinge
In his 1938 interviews with Alan Lomax, Jelly Roll Morton identified the Spanish tinge as a key
component of early jazz. Despite increasing scholarly interest in Morton and in Latin influences on
American music, this aspect of his music has received little attention. To come to terms with Morton’s
musical border-crossing, this paper addresses his exposure to Latin music, his sojourn in Tijuana,
his ride on the tango bandwagon, and his numerous Spanish-tinged compositions. Such an approach
also underscores how Morton’s Creole background and his creolized musical blend challenge jazz
narratives that rely on a black/white racial model.
Roustabouts, Black Levee Workers, and the Origins of Jazz Along the Mississippi & the Ohio Rivers,
1865-1917
WILLIAM KENNEY, Kent State University
This paper will explore an interstate, interurban network of African American manual laborers
developed along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers after the Civil War; a musical culture hidden
behind the racial stereotypes of the Broadway productions of Show Boat and camouflaged by the
lack of media to preserve the music for us. In freeing the slaves, the Civil War opened opportunity
to Free Black male laborers along the Inland Waterways in such jobs as longshoreman, stevedore,
and levee roustabout. In addition to working on packet boats, these workers also rode along on
and while between ports, they entertained the passengers with work songs and blues accompanied
by banjo, guitar, and harmonica, while providing various sorts of comic entertainment. “Frankie
and Johnny,” “Staggolee and Billy,” and “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,”
“Tah, Rah, Rah, Bump T’ay” are just some of the songs that emerged from this culture.
15c Orientalism
Henry Eichheim, Henry Cowell, and Japan
W. ANTHONY SHEPPARD, Williams College
58
For Eichheim, Japan had “a poetry no other country seems to possess.” He traveled there between 1915
and 1928 and composed pieces based on Japanese material. Japan was of central importance throughout
Cowell’s life. In the 1930s Cowell studied shakuhachi with Kitaro TAMADA, a musician who had met
Eichheim and who wrote poignantly to Cowell from Manzanar. Cowell traveled to Japan in 1957 and
1961 and composed several Japanese-inspired works. Juxtaposing the musical journeys of these two
composers and proselytizers highlights the roles Japanese music played for those Americans who sought
to sound “ultra modern” in the twentieth century.
Beyond the Pleasure-Dome: The Asian-influenced Music of Charles Tomlinson Griffes
American transculturalism is usually associated with such composers as Cowell, Partch, Hovhaness,
Harrison, and certain of the minimalists and post-minimalists. But before them came an earlier pioneering
generation, which included Henry Eichheim and Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920). During the
1910s, Griffes’s developing interests in the Orient engendered a number of works influenced by other
cultures, notably The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan. But while Kubla-Khan’s Orientalism is largely
superficial, other pieces—such as the songs Landscape and Tears, and the instrumental works Komori
Uta and Sho-Jo—show Griffes adopting quasi-Japanese compositional procedures, including the use
of drones, and of pentatonic and hexatonic modes. As well as examining the musical specifics of these
fascinating pieces, this paper will investigate Griffes’s complex—and not solely musical—reasons for
immersing himself in Eastern culture, and consider the possibility that for Griffes the Orient became a
portal through which he could escape to, and explore, his other—gay—self.
Henry Cowell’s Ongaku and a Transethnic Basis for the Tone Cluster
PETER SCHIMPF, Indiana University
In 1957 Henry Cowell composed an orchestral work titled Ongaku, which drew upon traditional Japanese
musical styles and techniques. A noteworthy feature of this work is Cowell’s employment of tone
clusters. What he had previously rationalized as secundal harmony in the 1920’s, is used in
this piece to evoke the clustered sonorities heard in traditional Japanese court gagaku. This
paper will explore the ways in which gagaku music specifically influenced Cowell’s Ongaku,
and how the use of tone clusters within Japanese court music affected his perception of the
tone cluster in general.
Cleveland, Ohio
59
INDEX
Prepared by
Subjects and Participants, by Sessions
Names of Presenters and Chairs in italics
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Cleveland, Ohio
61
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Cleveland, Ohio
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UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER PRESS
Claude Debussy As I Knew Him and Other Writings by
Arthur Hartmann
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Musics Modern Muse:
A Life of Winnaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac
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"Let the Church Sing!": Music and Worship in a Black
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The Pleasure of Modernist Music:
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Program - The Society for American Music

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