MUSIC HISTORY/THEORY WORKSHOP

Please join us for the second-to-last workshop of the year — next Wednesday!

Maria Josefa Velasco
Interpreting the Dreams of Méhul and Duval’s Joseph (1807): Opera and a New Religious Sentiment in Post-Revolutionary France

Wednesday, May 22 @ 4:30 PM
Logan Center for the Arts, Terrace Seminar Room 801

Mari Jo writes:

The paper draft I have submitted for your perusal is one I wrote for the seminar, “Power Plays: Opera and Politics, c. 1750-1800” taught by Visiting Professor Erling Sandmo. It explores how Etienne-Nicolas Méhul’s 1807 opera Joseph evokes a return to a simple, subjective religious sensibility amongst the powerful shifts in post-Revolutionary French society. Although scholars such as Elizabeth Bartlet have shown how stylistic and dramatic innovations at the Opéra-Comique during the Revolutionary period had a strong impact on the development of Romantic opera, I wish to examine in this paper how Méhul’s Joseph in particular contributes a music-dramatic portrayal of a revitalized religious sentiment which becomes highly influential in Romantic thinking.

My hope is to use this study as an entry into a broader research interest in tracing the complex, multi-faceted ebb and flow of religious sentiment and practice in France in the aftermath of the Revolution and the early nineteenth century. I am interested in exploring how music reveals certain aspects of the tensions between efforts to reinstitute Catholicism and the currents of secularization and anti-clericalism. With this paper on Méhul’s opera and your helpful feedback at our workshop conversation, I hope to consider these questions of musical representation and changing views on spirituality and religious practice in France.

Jessica Peritz will serve as respondent. All are welcome to attend!

To download the document, click here.

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Please join us for a special event in our Workshop schedule:

The Music History/Theory Workshop is delighted to welcome Jutta Toelle, Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago and Assistant Professor of Music at the Humboldt-Universität Berlin, who will be sharing a draft from her current book project.

Jutta Toelle
So schön singen die nackten Barbaren:
European narratives on “mission through music” in the Guaraní reductions

Wednesday, April 24 from 4:30 to 6:00 PM
Logan Center for the Arts, Terrace Seminar Room 801

Jutta writes:

I am presenting a draft for my chapter on the Guaraní reductions, which will be part of my current book project about the process of ‚mission through music’. In the course of this research, I want to find out how missionaries of the Catholic orders, above all Franciscans and Jesuits, used music in order to missionize the indigenous peoples in Latin America. I want to know how this process was transformed over time and have decided to also put emphasis on its perceptions and consequences in Europe. The time frame will be 1523 until roughly 1767, from the time the first official (Franciscan) missionaries entered Aztec territory until the year the Jesuits were expelled from the Spanish and Portuguese colonial territories. The contested concept of (European) music as a civilizing force and the entanglement of music in these dichotomies of barbarity and civilization form the core of my research. Questions of oral vs. written traditions and of the valorization of different types of music in the history of the Early Modern encounter are also important. Eventually, I want to show that the Catholic orders established a „layer“ of exoticism which is still powerful in many musical relationships between Europe and Latin America.

 Maria Welch will serve as respondent. All are welcome to attend!

To download the document, click here.

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Ethnoise! and the Music History/Theory Workshop are pleased to present the following joint Workshop:

Karl Swinehart
Collegiate Assistant Professor of the Humanities
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“Tupac in their Veins: Hip-Hop Alteño and the Semiotics of Urban Indigeneity”
Friday, April 5 | 3:30 to 5:00 PM
JRL 264

Professor Swinehart will be discussing hip-hop collective Wayna Rap’s work and the sociocultural milieu from which they emerge and, in turn, actively reshape, drawing on interviews with these artists and analyses of their lyrics and videos to illuminate the changing conditions of indigeneity in this corner of contemporary Bolivian society.

The pre-circulated reading is available here. If you require the password, please contact one of the student coordinators.

Refreshments, as always, are provided.

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We are delighted to have Andrew Cashner, Ph.D. Candidate in Music History and Theory, present in the final Workshop of winter quarter.

Andrew A. Cashner

Christ as a Vihuela, and the Limits of Imitation: José de Cáseda’s Villancico Qué música divina, c. 1700

Wednesday, March 13 from 4:30 to 6:00 PM
Logan Center for the Arts, Seminar Room 802

Andrew writes about his project:

This workshop paper is a very rough draft excerpted from my dissertation in progress. It is a poetic, musical, and theological analysis of a villancico from c. 1700, preserved in the collection of a convent in Puebla, Mexico, and attributed to José de Cáseda, a composer active in Zaragoza, Spain. This villancico represents Christ as a vihuela—the Spanish plucked string instrument related to the lute and guitar. In so doing, it pushes the norms of musical representation to their limits by including intentional errors of counterpoint and other kinds of “false” music (in the words of the villancico poem). I explore the piece’s place in several traditions: of theological and musical tropes of Christ as a musical instrument, and of earthly music as an imperfect reflection of heavenly music.

I would invite workshop participants to evaluate my interpretations of the poetry, music, and theology, and to critique the ways I have attempted to integrate historically-informed musical analysis with historical context and theological interpretation. I also welcome specific criticism of the translation and musical transcription.

Chelsea Burns will serve as respondent.

Andrew’s document is available here. If you require the password, please contact one of the student coordinators.

We hope to see you there for a lively discussion! Food & drink provided.

Yours,

Dan and Marcy

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This Friday, March 1 at 3:30pm in Logan 801 (please notice the change in date, location and time!!), we welcome Professor Martin Zenck, who will be presenting his work in the hopes of starting a discussion with members of the University before he takes up his post as visiting professor in the music department during Spring Quarter.

Professor Zenck’s areas of expertise are impressively diverse, but the reading circulated this week (available here) deals with myth and labyrinths: an abstract is posted below.

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Labyrinths

I. The subject of „Labyrinths“is related to the story of the „Minotaurus of Minos“. That is, my talk has to do with mythology and with the myth in general. Its open content will be told in every time and epoch in a new and other way. The reason for this is the fragmented tradition of this myth, the elliptical signature of this narration itself. There are within the myth itself inexplicable events and every later time is interested in finding reasons for the unexplainable in the narration (the “´récit”). We know from the famous book Work on myth (Arbeit am Mythos) by Hans Blumenberg that every time and era tries to find itself in those archaic narrations in order to find for itself a basis for the political self-foundation of a community via these ancient stories. So, the myth of the Labyrinth goes back to the minotaur of Minos in Crete and this récit has, as we will see later on, its preconditions before the official narration starts and its events within and without the place of the labyrinth; that is, with Ariadne handling her ball of wool outside of the labyrinth and Theseus with the thread inside the labyrinth. In a first approach we can emphasise the fact that the development of the myth lies in the unfolding of the narration of what happened outside and inside of the labyrinth.

And, what very important has been ever since this point of departure and for the history of
this myth is the fact that the labyrinth as a maze is determined as space, that is: it is walkable; we can move from the place of significance to a place of interpretation. It is always very important for the process of civilisation to show the transition between the Bedeutungsort (place of significance) and the Ort der Deutung (a place of interpretation), that is, that every knowledge is reducible to a first place of significance. We can think of Gustav Mahler’s “Klagendes Lied” with the singing bone in the fairytale of Ludwig Bechstein and the brothers Grimm, because this picture goes back to the myth of Orpheus: He was persecuted and torn to pieces by the Furies (Erinyes) and they had dispersed his bones in a famous river and these bones were singing about the fate of Orpheus.

II. Inside the labyrinth, in the space of knowledge, there is the conflict between chaos
and order and it is significant that due to the Age of Enlightenment, in a time of extreme
rationalisation, the labyrinth is in greatest demand, especially in the ‘Encyclopédy” by
Diderot and d’Alembert. In the introduction to this handbook of the contemporary knowledge we will find an article including the irony that the alphabetical knowledge of terms as a whole is a single labyrinth; that is, the more we know, the more we will move in a labyrinth. But at last the chaos of the maze still provokes the principle of order at that time, but with the result of stabilising the logical stratification of the Enlightenment.

III. When we follow the history of the maze from the end of the 19th century to the end of the 20th century we can stress the fact of a displacement, from the labyrinth as a real place like in the gardens of mazes and in labyrinthine music, from the outside of this place to an inner place into the labyrinth and into our self. Nevertheless, with Nietzsche we can emphasize the fact that we always have to go into our head, like Dionysos descends into Ariadne. In the image, as Nietzsche shows, Dionysos descending into Ariadne, we can recognize the labyrinth as a real place which is passable and transformed into the head and into the interior of Ariadne. So in consequence we can say that on the one hand the figurative significance of a labyrinth goes back to a real maze; on the other hand, according to Nietzsche, the labyrinth is projected onto two visions: that of Ariadne and that of Dionysos.

IV. In the period elapsing from Nietzsche to Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, between
the fin de siècle and the end of the 20th century, there starts a new development. In opposition to the 18th century the chaos of the labyrinth no longer had the function to stabilize the logic strategies of rationalism, but rather to emancipate the free fantasy in order to de-stabilize any kind of predetermined order. In his famous chapter “Le Labyrinthe” in the book “The Preparation of the Novel” Roland Barthes introduces the term “prohairesis” (gr. choice, decision from Aristotle’s Ethics) to define his procedure of writing in an open way with many bifurcations, like in an open form (cf. Umberto Eco), in which the author gets lost and very seldom returns to the apparent sanctuary of his self. With Pierre Boulez we can say that the labyrinth is a prototypical model for our age of Modernity/of Avantgarde, because in this place there is no going back: you can only go forward to the future in many directions.

Conclusion: Before introducing other and new aspects of the “Labyrinth”, regarding Karel
Kerenyi, Jorge Luis Borges and Luciano Berio, I will give a summary of my complete study
about the labyrinth.- The labyrinth as a metaphor for a space of knowledge has been analyzed from a philosophical retrospective. Therein the modern idea of a space of knowledge is referred to as initiated by Foucault. Foucault particularly treats the process of becoming conscious, which is latent in the Ariadne myth, in that the unconscious is transformed into consciousness and produces rationality, which does not rule out the option of seeing Ariadne’s thread as one frequently knotted, torn and intertwined. The unconscious can never be entirely comprehended; much less can its genealogy be understood in any narrative contingency. Therefore, the intrinsic enigma of the labyrinth does not consist in the taming of the bull’s (of the minotaur’s) fundamental powers but in the expectation that – in oppositions with scenographic intentions – life is fragmented. The effect of this insight and thus all metaphorology is obvious in the metamorphosis of actions, respectively in path-breaking decisions; however, and this is very crucial, in aestheticization, the entire human aspect of choosing a certain journey through life does not apply. – Invariably, aetheticization can only be an example of an ethic. This affects all attempts at creating a narrative frame of reference, for which, for instance, Roland Barthes’s problematization of the novel has been criticized.
The correspondence between hearing/perceiving and between seeing and invisibility becomes apparent in the myth of the Cretan Labyrinth: the acoustic labyrinth is different from the visual one. At his point, Ariadne’s thread is no longer helpful; but, according to Nietzsche’s insight, only the Dionysian free choice of interpretation will help. Different from the Minoan magic of seduction and reduction, the significance of the labyrinthian garden and of music lies in the age of baroque. The encyclopaedic thought of a universal order in nature necessarily leads to the thought of legitimizing this order, that is, the way in which the chaos of the world is organized ; not as chaos, but instead as nature. Here, the labyrinth turns into a metaphor of penetrating and fertilizing artistic and natural order, but also into a modern piece of advice on the question of which kind of dilemma a society of knowledge loses itself – a society of knowledge, which has forgotten about striding from a place of significance to a space of interpretation. Furthermore, the labyrinth offers advice to the question of which effect a world disintegrates into – a world which substitutes economized pictographically staged reflexes for supplies of deduction and interpretation and which withholds any further problematization of a mythical narration.

This Wednesday, February 27 at 4:30pm in Logan 802, we welcome Haun Saussy, University Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature here at the University of Chicago.

We will discuss a paper entitled “Prosody Between Music and Text: or, a Sidelight on Oral Poetry Theory,” available here (please email mcpierson [at] uchicago.edu for the password). An abstract of the paper is below:

“Prosody Between Music and Text: or, a Sidelight on Oral Poetry Theory”

 

The question of how textual knowledge was transferred from person to person before the common use of writing obsessed a number of anthropologists, religious scholars, and classicists in the early part of the 20th century. The reduction of text to schema, accomplished through prosody and semantic parallelism, seemed to promise a form of writing that would operate through the body rather than through extra-corporeal supports. I will try to excavate this archive in the hope of eliciting echoes from people knowledgeable about ethnomusicology.

Those needing additional assistance to attend or participate in this event should contact one of the student coordinators, Marcy Pierson (mcpierson@uchicago.edu) or Dan Wang (dyw@uchicago.edu).

If you would like to receive announcements for future Workshops and events, please contact Marcy or Dan, or add yourself to the listhost here.

Announcing the next Music History/Theory Workshop:

August Sheehy, Ph.D. Student in Music History and Theory
Music Analysis as a Practice of the Self
Wednesday, February 13 @ 4:30 PM
Logan Center, Room 802

August writes:

In the 1980 New Grove Dictionary, Ian Bent wrote, “[Music] analysis is a means of answering directly the question ‘How does it work?’” Analysis, he added, “strives toward the status of a natural science.” The same year, Joseph Kerman asserted in Critical Inquiry, “[T]he true intellectual milieu of analysis is not science but ideology.” The terms were thus set for polemical debates that unfolded over the next two decades but, ultimately, yielded inconclusive results. Analysis continued basically as it had before, as one form of recognized scholarship in an intellectual environment Kofi Agawu characterized as “precarious pluralism.”

What I find most intriguing about the debates over analysis in the 1980s and 1990s was the missed opportunity for theorists to develop an ethics of music analysis that would have answered to the criticisms rather than trying to deflect or deflate them. My dissertation proposal takes some preliminary steps toward such a defense. Beginning with Foucault’s observation, “Where there is power, there is resistance,” I argue that an ethics of analysis ought to begin with the study of individual analysts and their work. Through a series of bottom-up case studies spanning the nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth, I hope to show that modern music analysis can be a site of resistance to certain subjectivizing forms of power: the law, the university, the church, and, finally, music itself (by which I mean something quite different from absolute music, or the putative object of music analysis).

Abigail Fine will be our respondent.

Please familiarize yourself with the pre-circulated reading, available here. If you require the password, please contact one of the student coordinators.

Refreshments will be provided. We hope to see you there!

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For the next workshop, we welcome Miriam Tripaldi, a candidate in Music History/Theory here at the University of Chicago. Below is a note from Miriam about her project, and the pre-circulated reading is available here (email Marcy or Dan if you need the password).

See you on Wednesday,

marcy and dan

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This is a rough draft of one of the chapters of my dissertation, Style, Politics, Opera:
Musical Mobility and the Emergence of the Russian Nation, 1801–1861. My dissertation
examines the intercultural milieu in which mobile Russian, Italian, and French composers
(especially those working on opera) influenced each other’s creative practices and
the role of what one might label urban musical cosmopolitanism in the formation of a
Russian national identity in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Although scholars concerned with music in Russia have worked on the eighteenth
century and the second half of the nineteenth (from Mussorgsky’s work forward), they
have missed the opportunity to understand the entwined development of musical style
and notions of the nation-state by neglecting the first half of the latter century. Likewise,
although scholarship on the history of theatre in Russia has dealt with Imperial theatre
and art performances, scholars have yet to look at opera and questions of class and
musical mobility in the same light. What is missing, in fact, is a systematic study of the
period between the death of Catherine II (1796) and the established Russian musical
tradition (1860s).
In particular, my project focuses on composers who worked in Saint Petersburg during
the neglected period between the end of the eighteenth century and the middle of the
nineteenth century, such as François-Adrien Boildieu (1775–1834) and Alessandro Nini
(1805-1880). The Venetian composer Catterino Cavos (1775–1840) will receive special
attention because of the manner in which he combined Russian subjects with French and
Italian styles in his operas. He wrote the opera Ivan Susanin (1815) which later provided
the subject for Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, the first Russian National opera. Cavos, in
fact, is a key figure for any understanding of the processes of mediation, reception, and
mutual influence between Western European and Russian artists. In addition to showing
how Cavos was indispensible in the formation of a later Russian musical identity, my
aim is to show how he established a powerful network of artistic labor between Western
Europe and Russian as well as within Russia.

This chapter, tentatively titled “Russia’s Missing Middle Class and the Role of Artists
in Class Formation among the Others,” examines a series of reforms instituted by tsar
Alexander I in the first half of the nineteenth century in Russia. Moreover, it considers
how those reforms contributed to audiences’ changing access to cultural institutions, such
as the Imperial theatres.
In nineteenth-century Russia, beginning around 1806, in fact, what one might call
a middle class began to form wherein artists had greater economic status and their
cultural capital was related to assessments of their abilities and output as artists. Because
serfs coexisted with free people within a system of freedom and tsarist autocracy,
however, they produced their work in a system of inequality whose “creations” were the
opportunity for many people to change their social status.
Arguing that in Russia the notion of “a” middle class – at least in the first half of the
nineteenth century – is questionable, I will show how one can define that “paying” part
of society which grew larger in number and more ethnically hybrid in the first half of
the nineteenth century in Russia. I will argue that in Imperial Russia there was never
a “public sphere” as there was, on the other hand, in Western Europe. Defining what
constituted a middle class in the first half of nineteenth-century Russia will answer other
questions about music and musical agents (composers, musicians, artists). How were
their works written for Saint Petersburg in response to the new audience(s) in Russia
different from the ones they composed for other European theatres?

I just started to work on this chapter and as a result what you will read is a work in
progress. I started to review the secondary literature on the subject and primary sources
such as memoirs and accounts from the period, both in Russian and other languages
such as French, Italian, and English, result of travelers and/or artists who traveled/
moved to Russia during the first half of the nineteenth century. On Wednesday I would
be particularly interested in discussing issues of class and mobility both in Russia and I
would like to get feedback on how it might be compared to other European places and
times.

I look forward to your feedback.
Warm wishes,
Miriam Tripaldi

The first Workshop of Winter Quarter will be held on Wednesday, January 16.

Hyunree Cho, Ph.D. Candidate in Music History and Theory

Recursion and Interval (Part I)

This is the second chapter of my dissertation, Analysis as Poetry: Musical Transformation, Hermeneutics, and Music analysis. The main project of the dissertation is to offer an account of Lewinian transformational theory as a theory of musical meaning. This chapter, in tandem with the following one, develops a pragmatics of music analysis in which “poetic intervals” and meanings are tightly integrated rather than loosely coupled. In this workshop, I will particularly focus, however, on one of the seemingly least meaning-related aspects of our analytical ethos, that is, on the concept of recursivity. The concept’s at-a-glance view, one’s experience of it in time, and its appropriateness as a basic anchoring concept in various transformational sorts of analysis will be discussed.