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The 2024 Musicking Conference will be held in person at the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance. All events are free and open to the public, with no tickets or registration required.
DAILY SCHEDULE & EVENT DESCRIPTIONS
SCHEDULE UPDATE:
FRIDAY, APRIL 12TH, PANEL: RISING FROM OBSCURITY
NOW STARTING AT 12:00 P.M.
Tuesday, April 9, 2024
10:00-11:00 a.m.
Berwick Hall, 975 E. 18th Avenue
Presentation: “Making Space: Three Studies Examining Transgender and Gender Expansive Students in Music Education” (Jason Silveira, University of Oregon)
Transgender students are disproportionately targets of verbal and physical harassment at school, including by school staff and teachers. The general education literature contains findings on measures that provide safer environments for transgender students at school; fewer findings have been applied specifically to in-service and pre-service music teachers. These studies have the potential to inform how music teachers can work to prepare students and pre-service music teachers to be strong advocates for gender-expansive students.
11:00-11:45 a.m.
Berwick Hall, 975 E. 18th Avenue
Lecture-Recital: “Gender Bending in Opera: A Voice Science Approach to Understanding the Impact of Behavioral and Physiological Changes on Gender Expression” (Grace Vangel, Eugene, OR)
In this lecture recital, Grace Vangel, M.S., CCC-SLP, explores both physiological and behavioral factors that influence gender expression through a voice-science lens. They will first describe and demonstrate several of the physiological changes made to the vocal mechanism in order to masculinize or feminize the human voice, citing spectrograms and vocal anatomy in order to briefly explain the physics behind why certain sounds are perceived to be more masculine/feminine. Grace will then outline factors dictated by composers that impact gender expression, including rate of speech, sentence types, intonation patterns, and content of the text. Lastly, Grace will discuss what it means to be a non-binary soprano in the twenty-first century, and the power of a singer’s characterization choices in projecting gender identity onto characters.
12:00-1:00 p.m.
Berwick Hall, 975 E. 18th Avenue
Lecture-Recital: “Every Voice, Every Story: A Celebration of Gender Non-Conforming Singers”
This student-led panel is centered around education through song, and is led by gender non-conforming performers of the UO School of Music and Dance. Topics may include the hurdles of vocal transition, repertoire selection, and community experience with the goal of rethinking the role that gender plays in our craft.
2:00-2:45 p.m.
Berwick Hall, 975 E. 18th Avenue
Lecture-Recital: “Intimate Idiosyncrasy in Clara Wieck/Schumann’s Unpublished Songs” (Beverly Taflinger and Gustavo Castro, University of Oregon)
Publication and performance decisions for each of Clara Wieck/Schumann’s compositions—whether and in what form to make them public—involved the negotiation of myriad personal and social factors, her own artistic values and aims, career strategies, and considerations of reception in terms of both aesthetics and commercial viability. We see evidence in the differences between Wieck/Schumann’s autograph and published pieces, that the composer made significant changes to her compositions to prepare them for public consumption. Regardless of why they were kept private, analysis of Wieck/Schumann’s unpublished works uncovers her idiosyncrasy as a composer, held back in public iterations. In this lecture recital, Taflinger and Castro present some of Wieck/Schumann’s unpublished songs to showcase the musically daring compositional style the composer shared only with her inner circle.
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Berwick Hall, 975 E. 18th Avenue
Presentation: “Expanding the Renaissance: Exploration of the Music of Composers in Nueva España” (Caleb Saunders, University of Oregon)
Europe has had a monopoly on Renaissance music for far too long. Names like Byrd, Tallis, Monteverdi, Di Lasso, Josquin, and Tavener have become household names and are commonly heard in concerts and elsewhere (even as ringtones). Missing from this repertoire are names like Hernando Franco, Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, Francisco López de Capillas, and Ignacio de Jerusalem. Come discover the vibrant, profound, and abundant music contained within the Renaissance of Nueva España and expand your view of the Renaissance.
1:00-3:00 p.m.
Central Lutheran Church, Eugene (1857 Potter Street)
Concert and Post-Concert Discussion: “Sounding Bodies in the Most Holy Spaces: Bringing Eighteenth-Century Women’s Keyboard Music to the Organ” (Lindsey Henriksen Rodgers, University of Oregon)
Especially in comparison with the vibrant flowering of organ music in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and razzle-dazzle of symphonic showpieces of the nineteenth century, the standard organ repertoire from the late eighteenth century is underwhelming and sparse. For a number of reasons, composers who were trained on (and given access to) the instruments often sought out alternative genres and performing forces. Other composers, especially women, faced even more barriers to creating organ music. In addition to the practical roadblocks (sufficient free time to travel to a church to practice, clothing that accommodated playing the pedals, etc), women faced the ultimate theological barrier in St. Paul’s admonition that “women are to keep silent in the churches” (1 Corinthians 14:34, NASB). Luckily, many of these women were not silent in more private secular spaces, and much of their surviving keyboard music is filled with delightful, expressive, and imaginative musical ideas. In transcribing this music for the organ, I hope to bring the creative sounds of these women into a space that would have been forbidden to them during their lifetime.
Thursday, April 11, 2024
10:00-10:30 a.m.
Berwick Hall, 975 E. 18th Avenue
Presentation: “Transgender Identity in Musicology: Echoes and Reflections” (Aaron Beck, Lewis & Clark)
This presentation examines different ways we find ourselves echoed or reflected in music. How do we “hear” ourselves in a piece of music? I have worked as professional musicologist for thirty years, with a research focus on medieval/Renaissance Italian music and culture, and I present examples of the ways writers and musicians told stories with musical accompaniment to investigate ideas of the self. Music and stories create masks and alternate realities behind which people hide and/or thrive. In addition, the stories of music history provide avenues for self-discovery.
I will begin with Ovid’s Echo and Narcissus from the Metamorphoses and Boccaccio’s Decameron and follow with examples from Beethoven and Chopin and finally Meredith Monk. The talk will illuminate a transgender ear and lens for thinking about echoes and identity and suggest this unique perspective may serve to illuminate different ways that we embrace music.
10:30-11:30 a.m.
Berwick Hall, 975 E. 18th Avenue
Lecture-Recital: “Reviving Early Musical Practices for the Creation of New Music Today” (Anthony Petruccello, University of Oregon)
Anthony Petruccello is a composer who engages with early music theory and compositional approaches to inform his own compositional and improvisational practices. These approaches include hexachordal solmization, the Guidonian hand, early modal theory, improvised counterpoint, as well as an engagement with plainchant, troubadour and trouvère song, and fifteenth- and sixteenth-century polyphony. How Counterpoint was taught in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries differs greatly from how it is taught today. These older methods are not outdated, but are still very much useful for musicians and composers today.
1:00-2:30 p.m.
Berwick Hall, 975 E. 18th Avenue
Panel: Historical Women
“Duchess Anna Amalia of Weimar (1739–1807) as Musikkennerin: Uncovering Feminine Enlightenment Musical Practices” (Kimary Fick, Oregon State University)
At the turn of the eighteenth century and close of the Age of Enlightenment, an aging North German duchess reflected on the power of the arts, her contributions to humanity, and a means to guide a perceived sophistic society towards its moral purpose. Fragmented, yet recurring sentiments on taste and culture resonate in the little examined personal papers of Duchess Anna Amalia of Weimar (1739-1807), in which she wrote:
Many decorate their heads with beautiful things…[with] arbitrariness, [they] will reason and criticize art, science, and literature…seek[ing] to make [criticisms] valid from one’s pleasures. (Anna Amalia, D-WR1 HAA VIII 150a, 56r.)
The taste of the “ideal” enlightened woman was often judged by her sensitive expression of songs at the keyboard, while the status of a Kenner (connoisseur) was reserved for the all-knowing and rational man. The purpose of this paper is to dispel the pervasive narrative in Enlightenment criticism that presents this false dichotomy, limiting the view of eighteenth-century women as purely emotional bodies and restricting them to the lower status of mere music lovers. The Duchess’s extant manuscripts provide insight into how complex Enlightenment concepts such as “taste” and “culture” were disseminated to the public and, most importantly, how women understood and engaged with this philosophy. My analysis of these now-forgotten manuscripts documents musical performing practices that were critical in forming female identity in the eighteenth century. Duchess Anna Amalia’s writings provide a view of the Enlightenment rarely made apparent: that of the Kennerin, the ideal female musical connoisseur representing historical notions of womanhood.
“Can Cleofide Speak? Intersections of Gender and Colonial Discourse in Handel’s Poro re dell’Indie” (Anushka Kulkarni, University of California, Davis)
Dramatizing the clash between Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great and King Porus, who ruled portions of modern-day Punjab during the former’s fourth-century BCE Indian Campaign, Handel’s Poro re dell’Indie (1731) stands as an insightful example of opera seria’s engagement in narratives and histories of eighteenth-century imperial conquest. In this paper, I focus on the opera’s heroine Cleofide, a politically astute Indian queen and Poro’s betrothed. I ask how her musical-dramatic representation participates in discourses concerning British-Indian colonial encounter and the contingent formations of western selfhood and nonwestern Otherness. My approach to Handel’s score and libretto builds upon Edward Said and Ralph Locke’s work on orientalist discourse analysis. I consider how Handel adapts historical accounts of colonial encounter in antiquity to allegorize contemporary ideologies entrenched in projects of imperialism and colonialism in India. Furthermore, my analysis examines how Handel, through intertextual allusions to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its cultural reception in eighteenth-century England, contextualizes Cleofide within a repository of historical, literary, and theatrical heroines. Although political readings of Handel opera abound, time is ripe for a postcolonial approach to the politics of imperialism and colonialism in his life and works. Drawing eighteenth-century European writings on India together with frameworks from subaltern studies, I ultimately demonstrate a contrapuntal reading of Poro re dell’Indie that foregrounds both the opera’s entanglement in English metropolitan and colonial pasts, and the intersectionality of gender and racial Otherness.
“‘This god speaks with my voice’: Cupid Singers in French Opera” (Anita Hardeman, Western Illinois University)
Between 1728 and 1748, the god Cupid flourished on the Parisian opera stage, appearing in thirty different works. Yet his performers, almost exclusively women, did not experience the same level of prosperity. Drawn from the lowest salary tier of the Paris Opéra’s hierarchical employment structure, these singers struggled with financial precarity, social condemnation, and restrictive administrative practices as they attempted to make a living as performers. I argue that taking on the role of Cupid, a rare example of female-to-male cross-dressing on the French operatic stage, served an important function in the career of these singers. The presentation of Cupid within a context of desire established these performers as desirable themselves, potentially attracting the attention of wealthy patrons who could help alleviate the financial, social, and work challenges they faced.
This study focuses on four singers active in the 1730s and 40s: Marie Fel, Marie-Angélique Couppé, and Mllles Bourbonnais and Petitpas. Through an examination of the texts and music which these women performed, supplemented by contemporary reports, I build a more comprehensive picture of their abilities and working conditions, including the benefits and detriments of the patronage system, as well as the ways in which these women navigated the world as professional musicians. I am currently finishing a scholarly article on this topic.
In this study, I present voices that were lost, discarded, and suppressed, and reclaim a space for them, by situating these women in relation to the works they performed, the restrictions they faced, and the obstacles they encountered, thereby deepening our understanding of the importance of performers to the musical-historical narrative.
3:00-4:30 p.m.
Berwick Hall, 975 E. 18th Avenue
Keynote Address: “Inclusive Music Histories: On Origins, Beliefs, and the Power of Listening” (Ayana O. Smith, Indiana University)
(Reception to follow)
What is the role of history, images, and music in cementing our beliefs about identity? How can we use the power of community-based listening to inform performance? In this talk, Ayana O. Smith will discuss excerpts from her new book, Inclusive Music Histories (Routledge, 2024). The talk will emphasize music examples from George Frideric Handel’s Giulio Cesare (1724) and Duke Ellington’s Harlem Speaks (1935) to engage notions of culturally relevant performance. Artwork by French impressionist painter Frédéric Bazille (1841-1870) and African-American assemblage artist Betye Saar (b. 1926) will engage notions of curation and transformation as models for representing identity through music.
Friday, April 12, 2024
10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
NEW START TIME: 12:00 P.M.
Berwick Hall, 975 E. 18th Avenue
Panel: Rising from Obscurity
“Colonial Anxiety & Aboriginality: The Jindyworobakism of Peter Sculthorpe Through the Lens of Settler-Colonial Cultural Cringe” (Stephen de Filippo, University of California, San Diego)
This presentation examines Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe’s response to the notion of cultural cringe, a complex arising from the belief that colonial art is inferior to the imperial motherland’s by nature of its settler status. Sculthorpe’s reaction to cultural cringe serves as a lens through which we can view the incorporation of Aboriginal materials in his compositions, shedding light on how Australian artists address questions of identity in their work.
This research offers a nuanced analysis of how Sculthorpe’s works were shaped by this response to cultural cringe, highlighting the complexities of cultural representation in Australian art. While he critiques the commercialization of Australian identity, Sculthorpe’s compositions paradoxically perpetuate a similar artifice, a nationalistic identity known as jindyworobakism. Jindyworobakism is a well-meaning attempt by settler artists to define an Australian identity through the incorporation of Aboriginal materials in settler art—it is settler-curated Aboriginal culture inserted into Western art as a means of legitimizing settler connection to the land and creating cultural distinction. Sculthorpe, conscious of the politics of jindyworobakism, perpetuates an “authentic” connection to Aboriginality through a series of misleading performative acts— an American concept known as playing Indian.
In light of the failed 2023 Indigenous Voice referendum, which aimed to recognize the First Peoples of Australia, the question of settler relations with Aboriginal culture renews significance. The referendum’s failure, along with Sculthorpe’s legacy, underscores the colonial paradox in Australia: the appropriation of Aboriginal culture to sustain colonial occupation while distancing itself from the responsibility for its Indigenous peoples.
“Errant Textility: The Role of Musicking in Jon Rose’s ‘Great Fences of Australia’” (Oliver Brown, University of California Irvine)
Despite beginning over a decade before Christopher Small first described ‘musicking,’ composer Jon Rose’s Great Fences of Australia (1983–2015) is a multifaceted project which can be retroactively labelled as such. In this paper, I identify four different variants of Great Fences, considering how each represents a different hybridity of participatory and presentational performance modalities. This includes the original improvisations with violin bows on wire fences in the Australian outback; the fixed-media works produced using the resultant field recordings; subsequent gallery-installation performances; and, finally, the adaptation of the project into a concert-hall piece commissioned by the Kronos Quartet.
Beginning with the original Great Fences improvisations, I invoke Tim Ingold’s account of processual textility and Édouard Glissant’s notions of errantry and circular nomadism to frame Rose’s project as a participatory process of mapping the Australian outback’s variegated “sonic cartography.” Sounding out these vast physical barriers entails raising their sonic potential from obscurity; transforming dormant, inanimate fences into resurgent, ecologically-situated voices. I discuss how these voices are colonial articulations of sovereign Indigenous lands; in some areas, the arbitrary physical subdivision of the landscape forcefully supplanted traditional use of orally-transmitted navigational and narrative “songlines.” Evaluating Rose’s initial in-situ improvisations alongside the project’s eventual Kronos Quartet adaptation, I contemplate how these different performance modalities influence our interpretation of the fence-as-sounding-body. I contend that the four variants of Great Fences demonstrate how contemporary practices of musicking can encapsulate shifting performer-object dynamics, wherein the fence itself becomes a pseudo-agential element in the musicking paradigm.
1:00-2:00 p.m.
Berwick Hall, 975 E. 18th Avenue
Lecture-Recital: “Cherchez la femme: Keyboard Music by Baroque Women Composers” (Joyce Chen, University of Oregon)
This lecture-recital will introduce keyboard music written by female composers from the eighteenth century. I will discuss lesser-known keyboard works by Anna Bon di Venezia, Elisabetta de Gambarini, and Elisabeth Turner. This lecture recital will end with a twenty-minute performance comprising works from Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre to contemporary female composers of the twenty-first century.
2:30-4:00 p.m.
Berwick Hall, 975 E. 18th Avenue
Academic Workshop: “Increasing Inclusivity in the Classroom” (Ayana O. Smith, Indiana University)
6:30-7:00 p.m.
Frohnmayer Music Building, Room 163
Pre-Concert Lecture, Il Trionfo per l’Assunzione della Santissima Vergine, Nicola Ceva, Naples, 1705 (Holly Roberts, University of Oregon)
7:30 p.m.
Beall Concert Hall, 961 E. 18th Avenue
Concert: Il Trionfo per l’Assunzione della Santissima Vergine, Nicola Ceva (Naples, 1705), featuring the University of Oregon Musicking Ensemble
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