The Southeast Chapter of the American Musicological Society will hold its Spring 2025 meeting at Christopher Newport University on Saturday, February 22nd. The program and abstracts can be downloaded with this link.
Past conference programs are available in the Meeting Archives section.
AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY — SOUTHEAST CHAPTER
SPRING MEETING | 22 FEBRUARY 2025
CHRISTOPHER NEWPORT UNIVERSITY
8:30-9:00 AM REGISTRATION
9:00-11:00 AM PAPER SESSION A
Christopher Campo-Bowen, Virginia Tech
Exposing Fallacy behind the Myth: Women’s Compositional Practices in Regency England
Candace Bailey, North Carolina Central University
What Can a Women’s Union Sound like in America? Union Feminism and the Lowell Mill Girls
Maya Letherer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Ethel Smyth at the British Library: A Fresh Look at Smyth’s Early Chamber Manuscripts
Amy Zigler, University of North Carolina Greensboro
11:00-11:30 AM BREAK
11:30 AM-12:30 PM CHAPTER BUSINESS MEETING
12:30-2:00 PM LUNCH
2:00-3:00 PM KEYNOTE LECTURE
Archipelagic Listening: Caribbean Music and Practices of Borderwork
Jessica Baker, University of Chicago
3:00-3:30 PM BREAK
3:30-5:00 PM PAPER SESSION B
Mike Levine, Christopher Newport University
Dancing in Print: Aural and Bodily Memorization in Thoinot Arbeau’s Orchésographie
Matteo Sammartano, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Operatic Pastiche in the Rondo Finale of Hummel’s Trumpet Concerto
Ian Pearson, Winthrop University
Louis Prima and the Tarantella: From Taboo Folk Dance to Stereotypical Icon
Vincent Vaccaro, University of North Carolina Charlotte
ABSTRACTS
Exposing Fallacy behind the Myth: Women’s Compositional Practices in Regency England
Candace Bailey, North Carolina Central University
From the 1830s to the 2000s, every account of music collector and church music reformer Sir Frederick A.G. Ouseley describes him as a child prodigy without formal music training. My recent investigation into musicking among his family, however, reveals that although he may not have studied with a recognized male instructor, his sister Mary Jane “Janie” provided him with a solid foundation in harmony and composition during his youth. Her role has been minimized or even ignored over the past two centuries, yet the evidence supporting her own musical education and interaction with her brother’s childish melodies undeniably points to her having a direct influence on his development. This finding raises an important question: how many women in similar positions have been forgotten by history? In the 1820s, many young women were taught how to read figured bass and elemental harmony, but Janie Ouseley’s investment in harmony stretched further. She studied composition with Logier and left two manuscripts of exercises in advanced harmonic and contrapuntal procedures. She arranged Rossini’s overture to Semiramide, Beethoven serenades, and other works for performance in the home, and her hand is evident in manuscripts of Frederick’s music. Nevertheless, despite the key role she played in his musical development, her authority and accomplishments have been disregarded— even Fellowes’s famous catalogue of the Tenbury manuscripts fails to include her (and her mother) in the index. This presentation will elucidate Janie as student, composer, and teacher and then contextualize implications for women’s composition during the Regency and tyrannical historiography.
What Can a Women’s Union Sound like in America? Union Feminism and the Lowell Mill Girls
Maya Letherer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
What can a women’s union sound like in America? I answer this question by looking at one of the country’s earliest women’s unions, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association (LFLRA), founded in 1844 by textile workers in Lowell, Massachusetts. A series of broadside ballads published in the 1840s, which I argue were tied to the union, provide a vivid picture of the intersection of feminism and labor activism in the early industrial United States. Making explicit the connection between the LFLRA and “factory girl” ballads is an important step in showing a historical connection between music, women’s history, and labor. My approach to these songs is informed by musicological studies of voice and political solidarity. Key to my analysis is Roxanne Newton’s concept of “union feminism” in the 1960s and beyond, which I extend to a (proto) first-wave working community. By doing so I work to take seriously the perspective of women whose voices have not been a part of an American labor historiography, but were nevertheless vital to the U.S. labor movement. Lowell factory worker’s music, in particular, reveals a feminine and feminist approach to self-advocacy and worker solidarity that is striking, especially for its time. While working women today often “don’t see” themselves in labor history (Newton 2007), in truth the Lowell mill girls, as they were called, represent an early chapter in a long history of union feminism that plays an important role in understanding both feminist and labor activist histories in the United States.
Ethel Smyth at the British Library: A Fresh Look at Smyth’s Early Chamber Manuscripts
Amy Zigler, University of North Carolina Greensboro
Since the Suffrage Centennial, Ethel Smyth’s music has gained new interest, evidenced by a performance of The Wreckers with its original French libretto, a new critical edition of her Serenade in D, and the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Ethel Smyth. Each of these projects relied on the Ethel Smyth Collection of manuscript scores held at the British Library. My venture into the manuscripts began in 2006 while studying her chamber music as a doctoral student, and I have since visited the archives seven times. Although articles and dissertations have been published on Smyth’s chamber music, few scholars have examined the manuscripts. Instead, many cite the work of Kathleen Dale and Jory Bennett. As part of my recent research for the Cambridge Companion chapter on Smyth’s chamber music and a forthcoming critical edition of the Cello Sonata in C Minor, I re-examined the manuscripts, seeking to corroborate, and in some cases correct, this foundational scholarship on Smyth’s chamber works. My research also included an analysis of Smyth’s earliest completed string quartets (1880-1886) and compared them to her other chamber music manuscripts from the same period, revealing musical characteristics that Smyth employed in her early chamber works as well as ways in which Smyth borrowed from early compositions to create new works, practices she developed as a student and carried throughout her fifty-year career. While questions still exist, the result of this research is a more definitive compositional timeline, allowing for a musical analysis that explores the development of Smyth’s style.
“Silence is the Canvas behind the Sound”: Analytical Frameworks for the Underlying
Aesthetics and Structures of Rebecca Saunders’s Timbre-Driven Works for Strings
Morgan Rich, East Carolina University
Derivations of the phrase “silence is the canvas” commonly appears in Rebecca Saunders’s score notes and epitomizes her treatment of dialectical relationship between sound and silence. Saunders’s compositions expose the spatial properties of sound, extended techniques, and notational precision to place tones and resulting timbres under a magnifying glass, revealing a sonic universe different than postwar-era composers who concentrated on new colors and textures. Lachenmann, for instance, integrates non-standard playing techniques in his works to construct uncommon sonic arrays, while Grisey, among other spectralists, gave timbre particular emphasis by manipulating components of the spectrum of partials. Yet, Saunders’s exploratory approach to composition goes beyond reference to such composers and their styles, or even Cage-like aesthetics of sound. In this paper, I highlight Saunders’s current compositional aesthetics through stylistic and intertextual analysis to establish relevant concepts for timbre-centric readings of her works. Building on literature calling for foregrounding timbre as a first-order element and object of analysis (Dolan and Rehding, 2021), this paper focuses on her music for strings to demonstrate how an elemental idea evolves across works. Regardless of the scoring, Saunders’s compositions often feature a common gesture–– up-bow, double-harmonic trill glissando, for example, Solitude (2012) for solo violincello and Fletch (2013) for string quartet, which illustrate her deliberate treatment of timbre. This gesture, unique to bowed string instruments, yields, however, differing results every time. Working from a “severely reduced palette of timbres,” Saunders creates new, expanding spectrums of sounds all the while eschewing traditional melody, harmony, and sometimes pitch.
Dancing in Print: Aural and Bodily Memorization in Thoinot Arbeau’s Orchésographie
Matteo Sammartano, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
First printed in 1589 in Langres, France, Thoinot Arbeau’s Orchésographie is a fundamental example of early dance notation. Exploiting the possibilities of print technology to preserve and transmit sixteenth-century dance knowledge, the manual integrated musical, linguistic, and visual signs to foster an embodied chorographical memorization. Yet, as I argue, the system of signs in Orchésographie exposed the inherent tension between the ephemerality of dance movements and their representation on the printed page—a tension that resonates with Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance, that is, the simultaneous difference and deferral of meaning that occurs between a sign and its attributed signification. In this paper, I draw on différance to foreground the epistemological problem of movement notation, as it surfaces from the dance manual. Then, I explore how Orchésographie facilitated embodied learning and memorization by employing multi-sensory pedagogical strategies in the form of memoranda, woodcuts, and dance tablatures. While those notation experiments expanded the possibilities of dance transmission, they also underscored the limits of print in capturing the full essence of movement. By analyzing Orchésographie as both a repository of embodied knowledge and a site of semiotic tension, this presentation queries the way Renaissance print culture sought to negotiate the boundaries of knowledge materiality, and the fixation of ephemeral, bodily practices in particular.
Operatic Pastiche in the Rondo Finale of Hummel’s Trumpet Concerto
Ian Pearson, Winthrop University
Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s Trumpet Concerto was composed in the year 1803 for the newly invented keyed trumpet of Anton Weidinger, an imperial court trumpeter. Over the next 150 years, the concerto fell into obscurity but was rediscovered and is now included in the mainstream repertory for the modern trumpet. In 1992, an article titled, “Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s “Rescue” Concerto: Cherubini’s Influence on Hummel’s Trumpet Concerto” (by this author) revealed that the third movement, the rondo finale, concludes with a march borrowed from Cherubini’s opera, Les deux journées (1800). This discovery raised new questions about the overall design of the last movement, which has remained a mystery for the last thirty-three years. Upon re-examination, however, this study reveals that Hummel, a master of variation form, superimposed a full operatic pastiche on the rondo form of the concerto’s finale. It shows how Hummel derived motives for the pastiche from Act II and Act III of Cherubini’s opera. More specifically, it demonstrates how Hummel, following eighteenth-century principles of musical rhetoric, cobbled together three leading motives from the Introduction to Act III (entr’acte) in a non-standard periodic phrase structure for the refrain of the rondo form. Finally, it recounts Hummel’s extraordinary ability to create thematic variations spontaneously, and it underscores the popularity of Cherubini’s Les deux journées that inspired Hummel to create a pastiche for the rondo finale of his Trumpet Concerto.
Louis Prima and the Tarantella: From Taboo Folk Dance to Stereotypical Icon
Vincent Vaccaro, University of North Carolina Charlotte
The tarantella is a southern Italian folk dance characterized by a fast and erratic compound rhythm. Derived from paganism, it has been vilified as barbaric in the predominantly Catholic northern regions of Italy for centuries. In the second half of the twentieth century, the tarantella experienced a revival in the United States, primarily as a result of the descendants of Southern Italian immigrants implementing the folk dance into their music. This paper will examine the music of Italian-American jazz trumpeter and vocalist Louis Prima, who was among the first to blend the tarantella with American popular music. Prima composed several “Italian novelty” songs that infused the tarantella into elements of jazz, while also writing lyrics about his Italian upbringing and singing in an exaggerated Italian accent. The majority of these songs were created shortly after World War II, when there was still a significant degree of anti-Italian sentiment in the United States. The manner in which Prima’s music protested this sentiment was unique: instead of attempting to glorify and legitimize his cultural heritage, he amplified Italian stereotypes through humorous self-deprecation. The popularity of Prima’s Italian novelties prompted a reevaluation of Italian culture in America, replacing images of fascism with reverberations of joy.
Keynote: Archipelagic Listening: Caribbean Music and Practices of Borderwork
Jessica Baker, University of Chicago
Biography
Jessica Swanston Baker is an ethnomusicologist who specializes in contemporary popular music of and in the Circum-Caribbean. Her research and critical interests include tempo and aesthetics, coloniality, decolonization, and race/gender and respectability. As a Caribbeanist, her work focuses on issues within Caribbean theory pertaining to small islands-nations such as representation and invisibility, vulnerability, and sovereignty. Her current ethnographic book project, The Aesthetics of Speed: Music and the Modern in St. Kitts and Nevis examines the relationship between tempo perception and gendered and raced legacies of colonization. Through historical and ethnographic analysis of polysemantic colloquialisms and music reception, she argues that colonial understandings of black femininity, and Enlightenment notions of musicianship frame local perceptions of wylers, a style of Kittitian-Nevisian popular music, as “too fast.” Her most recent article, “Black Like Me: Caribbean Tourism and the St. Kitts Music Festival,” takes up music tourism as a second area of research interest. This work centers on black diasporic travel between the United States and the Caribbean, and the performance and consumption of American soul music within the context of Caribbean music festivals.
Jessica holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Pennsylvania and a BM in Vocal Performance from Bucknell University. Prior to her faculty appointment at Chicago, Jessica was the 2015-16 postdoctoral fellow in Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University.