Virtual AMS/SMT 2020 Annual Meeting

Every year, the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory convene hundreds of scholars from around the world to share and discuss the latest research and thinking in the fields of music history and theory. In light of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, both organizations have moved their meetings online and will share them jointly over the weekends of November 7-8 and 14-15.

This year's meetings feature fourteen faculty and current students from the University of Chicago, in addition to a number of University alumni. View the schedule and select abstracts below, and join University of Chicago students and faculty at the AMS/SMT 2020 Virtual Annual Meetings.

Saturday, November 7

10:00 AM – 10:50 AM – Musical Contagions, Circulations, and Ecologies of Listening to Social Media

“Of Gimmickry and Man: The Lick’s Circulation through Virtual Jazz Communities” – Hannah Judd

In 2011, Alex Heitlinger, a senior at New England Conservatory, uploaded the video “The Lick” to YouTube. A 1:34 compilation, it excerpted different performances, from John Coltrane to Stravinsky, that each deployed the same seven-note musical riff (a “lick” in colloquial jazz terms). Heitlinger was in a Facebook group where users would post instances of the lick that they found, but his particular gathering of the videos was retweeted by Questlove and NPR and currently boasts nearly three million views. The lick’s online trajectory accelerated at the moment the video went viral. I explore the widespread digital dissemination of jokes, videos, and memes that feature the lick, suggesting that it functions as a mimetic device that users can deploy to signal both their belonging and their individuality within a larger jazz community. Recognizing the joke becomes synonymous with those who possess jazz knowledge. The lick, in its formulaic deployment within these “insider” spaces, suggests the death of improvisation, the use of a set riff over spontaneity. It becomes a calling card for performers and listeners alike to determine a legitimate participant on and offline--who gets the joke? I suggest that the lick’s online proliferation becomes a gimmick intentionally through its repetition, pointing to both the lick’s hyper-presence and how complaints about the excessive posts of the lick are themselves recycled into over- repeated jokes. In doing so, I argue that the lick serves as the basis for a study in intracommunity dynamics and specifically humor and gimmickry in identity formation.

10:00 AM – 10:50 AM – Excavating the Castrato: Toward New Archaeologies

“The Verismo Trace and the Phantom Castrato.” – Martha Feldman

On a common view, phonography offers acoustic presence, amplifying sound, even as it highlights absence--the loss of immediacy that live performance should provide. This paper confronts that paradox through recourse to recordings made to preserve castrato vocality at the very moment of its demise, in Rome 1902-04, when acoustic capture of the last castrato Alessandro Moreschi sought to preserve a vanishing performance tradition.

How might an archaeology of Moreschi's vocality uncover those material remains? How might it give purchase on Moreschi's idiosyncratic and bewildering vocal habits as acoustic shards of past practices that surface in the form of the trace, above all laryngeal catches in the throat manifested as unpitched phonations, aspirates, upward scoops, and even sobs?

My paper addresses these questions by following Moreschi's vocal tics backwards in several forking traditions, each with separate but overlapping residues: 1) a bel canto and castrato tradition described by Pierfrancesco Tosi (1723), Domenico Corri (1810), Manuel Garcia Jr. (1840), Paolo Pergetti (1850), and others; 2) a longstanding Sistine tradition documented by chapelmaster Giuseppe Baini (1806) and Felix Mendelssohn (1831); and 3) a romantic but ultimately verismo tradition that sounded in the opera houses of Moreschi's time. Pursuing the first two, the paper augments evidence first adduced by Robert Buning (1990). For the third, it combines new archival findings with a wealth of early and neglected phonographic evidence of opera singers Moreschi would have heard, as established in oral histories I have taken from Moreschi's living descendants, who describe him as having been a regular attendee at the opera. The last aligns with his documented second life as a salon singer of female arias and illuminates his vocal affinities with operatic divas staged during Moreschi's Roman years (1871-1922), including Ernestina Bendazzi-Garulli, Cesira Ferrani, and Emma Calvé. The paper ends by rethinking the Derridean trace and Certeau's "vocal utopias" in relation to what I call a "sacred vernacular" that tempered verismo's raw emotionality with nineteenth-century religious sentimentality and that can be tracked through the quirky aural tattoos of the upward appoggiatura and the sob as historically embedded phono/graphic plays of difference.

1:00 PM – 1:50 PM – Emotion and Meaning in Film Music

“The Bittersweet Spot: Music, Melodrama, and Mixed Emotions.” – Berthold Hoeckner

Amid the burgeoning opportunities of modern life, choices are often assessed in hindsight with mixed feelings. Modifying the tragic "too-late" trope of melodrama (as in La Traviata) movies sometimes deploy bittersweet songs or musical underscoring to express how characters mitigate retrospective regret by alleviating loss with solace, guilt with atonement, or sacrifice with redemption.

Before delving into a case study, I will sketch the anatomy of bittersweet music and its effects, based on ongoing empirical research at the intersection of music and social psychology (including controlled studies of musical stimuli as well as big data analysis of sentiments in online responses to musical selections). Within a semantic field demarcated by nostalgia, wistfulness, and melancholy, music's bittersweet spot can be located in a matrix of modal mixture, modulations with secondary dominants, usage of major and minor seventh chords, soft timbres and dynamics in midtempo, and topical references to genres such as the slow waltz, piano ballad, or farewell song.   

Critics applauded Damien Chazelle's romantic comedy-drama-musical La La Land (2016) mostly for its bittersweet ending to the story of aspiring actress Mia and struggling jazz pianist Sebastian. After helping each other realize their dreams, they part ways to pursue divergent careers. Years later, a famous and happily married Mia chances upon Sebastian in his own jazz club. Accompanied by a valse triste that pairs up with Sebastian's bittersweet theme for Mia, the film closes with a sequence in the style of a classical dream ballet where the former lovers imagine a life they might have had together-a scenario alluding to the heart-tugging ending of Back Street (1932) whose 1941 and 1961 remakes where both scored by Frank Skinner.

Within the history of emotions, bittersweet music has become both a symptom of and remedy for one of modernity's most vexing predicaments: the counterfactual fantasy. Its mixed emotions not only underwrite the persistent premise of melodrama as providing public access to "the unprotectedness of one's feelings" (Thomas Elsaesser), but also lend a voice to the "cruel optimism" (Lauren Berlant) of imagining unattainable outcomes.

1:00 PM – 1:50 PM – On Rotational Form

“Formal Process as Reanimation of the Past in Enrique Granados’s ‘Epílogo: Serenate del Espectro’.” Audrey Jane Slote

Goyescas, the programmatic suite for solo piano by Enrique Granados, encompasses a love story between maja and majo, stock characters from Castilian folklore. Snippets of fanciful text explaining the story punctuate the score. In the final movement, “Epílogo: Serenate del Espectro,” the majo, who has died, returns in ghostly form to serenade his lover. The music’s structural underpinnings vivify this narrative turn. In its formal and motivic design, “Epílogo” renders the past audible in the musical present by multiple currents of transformation.

My analysis traces three transformative processes in “Epílogo:” quasi-rotational form and its structural deformation, motivic relationships across different narrative spaces, and the clarification of motivic identity. I first explore how a substantial formal rupture enacts a crossing-over into reminiscence. I then trace how earlier motives foreshadow the reemergence of the musical past. Finally, I identify how certain motives come to be associated with everyday objects, a process of “disenchantment” that retroactively highlights the objects’ bewitchment. My reading draws upon concepts of teleological genesis and rotational form (Hepokoski 1993), voice (Abbate 1991), and temporal fusion (Kaplan 1996).

“Epílogo” encapsulates Goyescas’ contribution to a turn-of-the-century cultural project in which Spanish artists aimed to determine a quintessential national ethos and to represent it through their work. With this project, I aim to contribute to scholarship focused on Spanish art music in the early twentieth century, a repertoire that is less well-represented than others in current music-theoretical discourse.