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Friday, March 10, 2023
“Out of Tune: Towards an Affective Ecology of Early Modern Warfare,” Keynote Address by Bettina Varwig, Professor of Music History University of Cambridge
10:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Participate via Zoom OR Broadcast Live in Berwick Hall OR watch via the Musicking YouTube Channel
Description: This paper explores how we might study the interweaving of music, sound, affect and warfare historically. It focuses on the Thirty Years War as a moment of pan-European political, religious and affective crisis in the early modern period. Recent key contributions in sound studies and affect theory have tended to position sound and/or affect as a-historical, pre-cultural forces. In this paper, I suggest not only that these phenomena do have histories, but that the broad historical shift from Western pre-modernity to modernity fundamentally transformed individual and collective experiences of the sounds and musics of war.
Bettina Varwig is Professor in Music History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Emmanuel College. She has published widely on music and cultural history in the early modern period, in particular in the German-speaking lands. Her research explores questions of musical meaning and expression, historical modes of listening, and music’s place in the history of the body, the emotions and the senses. She is author of Histories of Heinrich Schütz (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and editor of Rethinking Bach (Oxford University Press, 2021). Her most recent monograph, Music in the Flesh: An Early Modern Musical Physiology, is forthcoming with The University of Chicago Press.
“Sounds of War, Performance Practice, and Aesthetics: Alessandro Poglietti’s Battle Music on Keyboard Instruments,” Intermezzo Lecture-Concert by Joyce Chen
12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. Live in Berwick Hall OR watch via the Musicking YouTube Channel
“Continuing the Conversation/Conservation: Forty Years in the Trenches at the Mecca of MedRen Music” with lutenist Crawford Young
1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. Live in Berwick Hall OR watch via the Musicking YouTube Channel
Description: HIP, CIPP or plain-old Authenticity? This response, inspired by Marc Vanscheeuwijck’s keynote lecture during the 2022 Musicking Conference, will focus on similar topics for pre-Baroque music, specifically, mensural polyphony from c. 1300 – c. 1530, referred to here as “MedRen” [Medieval-Renaissance] music. Performance practice…what a long, strange trip it’s been. Where are we, how did we get here, where might we go? Calling upon my first-hand teaching perspective of four decades at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, I suggest some answers for performers, musicologists, festival organizers, and institutional educators.
Crawford Young graduated from New England Conservatory in Boston. Before concentrating on lute, he was a guitar student of Robert Paul Sullivan. He studied medieval music with Thomas Binkley at Stanford University prior to joining the medieval ensemble Sequentia in Cologne in 1978. Young was a founding member of Boston-based Project Ars Nova and director of the Ferrara Ensemble of Basel (Diapason d’Or de l’Année 1996, finalist for Gramophone’s Early Music Recording of the Year). With some thirty critically acclaimed early music recordings, he continues to be a prominent interpreter of early lute music. Young’s research publications include chapters in Performer’s Guide to Medieval Music (2000), Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis (1984), and Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music (1992). In 2003 Young published Sources of Early Lute Tablatures in Facsimile, an extensive collection of the earliest lute manuscripts and definitive history of the fifteenth-century lute, in collaboration withMartin Kirnbauer.
Since 1982 Young has taught lute, and interpretation and performance practice at the Schola Cantorum in Basel. From 1989 – 94 he taught medieval lute at the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique in Lyons, and since the early 1980’s he has given courses at conservatories and universities in Europe, North America and Australia.
Panel: “War, Conflict, Musicking”
2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. Participate via Zoom OR Broadcast Live in Berwick Hall OR watch via the Musicking YouTube Channel
“Missae in Angustiis: Liturgy and the Sound of Dynastic Continuity in Vienna, 1740-1748” by Erick Arenas (San Francisco Conservatory of Music)
After the death of Emperor Charles VI, the Habsburg monarchy faced the greatest crisis of its early modern history: a war of succession that briefly stripped it of its imperial status and threatened its continued political relevance. Against this background, scholars have tended to view musical life around the court of Vienna during the 1740s solely in terms of a precipitous late Baroque decline. Nevertheless, a thread of sustained musical vitality and development is found in the liturgical music of this context, in particular the genre of the concerted solemn mass. The cultivation of this type of work not only occupied a central place in the Viennese soundscape during these early years of the reign of Maria Theresia, it responded to imperatives of the time and shifting musical values with novel and consequential approaches to composing the mass ordinary.
This paper shows how such missae solemnes served to reinforce the ideas of Habsburg piety, power, and constancy by adapting the traditional modes of imperial musical triumphalism to the straitened political circumstances and more reserved ritual of the time. The resulting style retains Baroque elements while exhibiting greater formal cohesion, more refined text declamation, and more subtle use of concertante instruments. Examples will be taken from unpublished masses in the archive of the Vienna Hofkapelle by Georg Reutter, Jr., Antonio Predieri, and Christoph Wagenseil, works that were performed in state liturgies at the Viennese court and cathedral during these turbulent years and would influence future generations of Austrian composers.
Erick Arenas received his Ph.D. in musicology from Stanford University, where he completed a dissertation on Johann Michael Haydn and the orchestral mass in eighteenth-century Vienna and Salzburg. He completed his M.A. at the University of Oregon and B.Mus. at the University of the Pacific. He teaches courses in eighteenth and nineteenth century music at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
“Partitioned by Politics, Sutured by Song: The Border Crossings of the Protest Song from Pakistan to Sri Lanka – Via India” by Balakrishnan Raghavan (University of California Santa Cruz)
In 1986, Iqbal Bano, an acclaimed female Pakistani singer, sang leftist poet and revolutionary Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s 1979 Urdu poem “Hum Dekhenge” (“We will see”) to rousing crowds in Lahore, Pakistan. The performance was secretly recorded, and a smuggled copy circulated in South Asia, bringing the poem into popular culture as a protest song. Bano’s affective expression was magnified by her subversive signs: She wore a saree and sang Faiz’s poems, both banned in Pakistan during General Zia-ul-Haq’s authoritarian rule.[1] The audience is raucously shouting, “Inquilab Zindabad” (long live revolution), cheering for the lines “Every crown will be flung, Each throne brought down.” The electric audience, sloganeering, and keeping time, remind us of what Rosenthal and Flacks discuss regarding the audience never being passive in communal expressions of protest.[2] This is true even for contemporary protest renditions of this protest song.
The paper examines the social biography of the poem turned song, specifically, the politics of performance, poetic/musical translations, and the modalities of censorship across geographies partitioned by war and colonialism: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. As a circulating symbol in popular culture, the poem-song has become a sign of affective expression infused with and without subversive politics in South Asia. The translations of Hum Dekhenge into South Indian languages were by women poets, with each topical rendition involving literary, political, and musical choices.[3] It is generative to re-think what scholar Aamir Mufti calls Faiz’s lyric history in the sub-continent through a feminist lens as this song sutures itself in protests crossing borders.
[1] One can listen to it on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/dxtgsq5oVy4 .
[2] Rosenthal, R. and Flacks, R. (2011) Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements.
Boulder: Paradigm. Pg. 96.
[3] Ponni and Mangai translated it into Tamil, Madhoo into Telugu, Shameena Begum into Malayalam, and Mamata Sagar/Maitreyi Karnoor into Kannada.
Balakrishnan Raghavan is an accomplished musician, researcher, and educator. He is a doctoral student in cross-cultural musicology at the University of California Santa Cruz. Bala’s work focuses on oral traditions of music across the Indian subcontinent, with an emphasis on the politics of spirituality, performance, poetry, archives, digital humanities, mystical traditions, caste, and gender. He is a STEM-trained computer science engineer as an undergraduate, and an Arts/Humanities/Social Science trained doctoral student. With over ten years of interdisciplinary performance experience, he attempts to re-imagine the many ways of looking at traditional music from India, centering the marginalized experience at the intersection of song, immigration, race, queerness, personal narrative, transnational experience, and performance.
Saturday, March 11, 2023
Community Musicking! Come Sing with Us!
10:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. Live in Berwick Hall
Description: All are welcome to join us and partake in the joy of community musicking during this sing-along event! During this session, participants will be led by Kendra Taylor (Ph.D. candidate, Music Education), Mary Brandenstein (master’s student, M.M. Choral Conducting), and Caleb Saunders (master’s student, M.M. Choral Conducting) in learning music from Heinrich Schütz’s “Das Blut Jesu Christi” (SWV 298). Text and music from this small-scale sacred concerto are shared with Schütz’s important work, Musikalische Exequien, which will be performed by the UO Musicking Ensemble later on Saturday evening. Come learn about historic text pronunciation and culturally informed performance practices, and engage in the joy of singing with our Eugene-Springfield community!
Download Your Copy of Schütz’s “Das Blut Jesu Christi” (SWV 298)
Listen! Performance by Weser-Renaissance Bremen, Manfred Cordes
Read! “Das Blut Jesu Christi” Text & Translation
“Voices of War: An Exploration of Songs in Periods of Conflict,” Intermezzo Lecture-Concert by Naomi Castro
12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. Live in Berwick Hall OR watch via the Musicking YouTube Channel
Description: In this hour-long lecture-concert, Eugene-based vocalist, Naomi Castro and University of Oregon keyboardist Tung Nguyen, take the audience through a survey of songs written during and about times of conflict. Featured repertoire includes works spanning the Middle Ages to today.
Naomi Castro cultivated her love of singing and music on the island of ‘Oahu where she sang with the Lutheran Church of Honolulu, St. Andrew’s Cathedral, Hawaii Opera Theater, and Early Music Hawaii. She taught K-12 choir at a small private school in downtown Honolulu for 7 years before leaving the islands. She moved to Eugene in 2018 to attend the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance, where she was a Graduate Employee for the Music Education and Voice Performance departments. She graduated with a master’s degrees in Choral Conducting and Voice Performance in 2022. Naomi enjoys a robust musical life as Central Lutheran Church’s soprano section leader, Eugene Opera’s chorus master, and as a soloist in various projects. Her most recent endeavor has been learning about arts administration by working for the Oregon Bach Festival as their Development Program Assistant. When she’s not making music (and the weather is right) Naomi loves exploring the incredible breweries, restaurants, and hikes the PNW has to offer, alongside her fiancé, Dylan. If the weather isn’t right, she can be found at home snuggling with her cat, Jabba.
Concert: “The Effects of War on Musicking: The Music of Heinrich Schütz and His Contemporaries”
6:45 p.m. – 7:15 p.m. pre-concert lecture, 7:30 p.m. concert, Live in Central Lutheran Church, Eugene
Performed by the UO Musicking Ensemble, Led by Holly Roberts and Eric Mentzel, Assisted by Craig Phillips and Margret Gries
Featuring Lindsey Rodgers, organ and Emma Simmons, baroque violin