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IU Musicology Graduate Student Recovers Lost Episode of Weird Studies

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Congratulations to PhD student Meredith Michael for her work on episode 99 of the Weird Studies podcast. This episode, which was released on May 26th of this year, is a never before seen “lost episode” that was recorded back in 2019. Meredith took it upon herself to take the existing conversation footage (almost three hours worth!) and cut it into a concise, well-shaped, tightly-edited episode. She also added her own spoken introduction.

Meredith has been working as a production assistant to Weird Studies over the past year, and will be continuing her post into the next. Through her work there, Meredith has been encouraged and expressed interest in creating a podcast of her own on her work with space music. We look forward to hearing more from her in the future!

Weird Studies is a podcast hosted by our very own professor Phil Ford and writer/filmmaker J. F. Martel. From the podcast’s website, the show is “a series of conversations on art and philosophy. Weird Studies 99 is titled “Curing the Human Condition: On ‘Wild Wild Country.’” It is a discussion with a starting point on Wild Wild Country, a Netflix docu-series on religious and political conflicts between groups in rural Oregon. It then branches out into a wider conversation between Ford and Martel about spirituality and religion in modern society.

(Check out this episode here.)

Keslie Pharis awarded 2021 Austin B. Caswell Award

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Congratulations to Jacobs School of Music student Keslie Pharis whose paper entitled “The English Anthem from the Reformation to the Restoration: The balancing of Catholic and Puritanical influences in English church music” was awarded the 2021 Austin B. Caswell Award. 

The essay, submitted for M401 History and Literature of Music I, addresses the English anthem as the musical middle ground between Catholicism and Protestantism following England’s separation from the Vatican. Amidst staunch Puritanical reformers and lingering Catholic influence in the sixteenth century and beyond, the Anglican anthem musically merged these two traditions in beautiful and theologically appropriate forms. “The English Anthem from the Reformation to the Restoration” explores the background, definition, and purpose of the anthem and discusses compositional examples by Thomas Tallis, Orlando Gibbons, and Henry Purcell.

Keslie Pharis is graduating this spring from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music with a B.M. in oboe performance under the instruction of Linda Strommen. Recently, she has performed with the IU New Music Ensemble, New Voices Opera, and the IU Chamber and Symphony Orchestras. At the Jacobs School, she also serves as a Project Jumpstart Student Affiliate and as the President of Classical Connections, organizing and performing outreach concerts and facilitating mentorship of local middle school and high school musicians. In the fall, she will be attending The University of Wisconsin-Madison as a Paul J. Collins Distinguished Graduate Fellow to pursue her M.M. in Oboe Performance.

 

AUSTIN B. CASWELL

Austin B. Caswell
Austin B. Caswell was a devoted teacher and member of the musicology faculty at Indiana University

The Austin B. Caswell Award was established in 1998 in honor of Caswell, a devoted teacher and member of the musicology faculty at Indiana University from 1966 until his retirement in 1996. Each spring, the award recognizes the best undergraduate music history projects submitted at the Jacobs School.

Caswell was born in Minneapolis, MN, the son of Austin B. Caswell Sr. and Corice Woodruff Caswell. A graduate of West High School (Minneapolis, 1949), Caswell received his B.A. in History from Amherst College (1953), and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Minnesota (1957, 1964).

His early years of teaching included the Vermont Academy and the University of Minnesota General College. But the bulk of his teaching career was as Professor of Musicology at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music (1966-1996) where he served as Chairman of the Musicology Department for several years. He also taught for the IU Honors College (1973-2006) and the IU Intensive Freshman Seminar program.

A lifetime choral musician, Caswell also served as Music Director for several churches including Wayzata Community Church (Minneapolis, MN, 1961-1966) and First United Church (Bloomington, IN, 1966-1971).

Elizabeth G. Elmi awarded 2021 Susan J. Ridyard prize at the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium

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Congratulations to Jacobs School of Music musicology alumna, Dr. Elizabeth Grace Elmi, whose paper entitled “L’arboro captivo fa captivo fructo: Pastoral Politics in the Lyric Song of Late-FifteenthCentury Southern Italy” was awarded 2021 Susan J. Ridyard prize at the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium. 

Dr. Elmi’s paper addresses the substantial portion of the surviving Neapolitan lyric repertory that emphasizes a nostalgic and often embittered focus on rural, wild, and untamed settings. She argues that such pastoral and naturalistic imagery and aesthetics had clear political implications related to the shifting power structures influencing the Kingdom’s social hierarchies under Aragonese rule. Dr. Elmi considers the notated Neapolitan song repertory alongside Iacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia as contrasting, yet complementary, examples of a cultural impulse to both lament and reassert the feudal aristocracy’s land ownership and rural cultural identity, lost to a destabilizing foreign power. 

The Susan J. Ridyard prize is awarded yearly to an excellent paper addressing topics most related to the colloquium theme, which this year was “Privilege and Position.” Dr. Elmi’s paper addressed the colloquium theme in the process of exploring the shifting privileges and positions of the Neapolitan aristocracies living under Aragonese rule through the aesthetics and imagery of their song practices. 

Dr. Elmi presented her paper at the the Forty-Sixth Annual Sewanee Medieval Colloquium hosted by the University of the South, Sewanee, TN, on April 9-10, 2021. Presentations and papers related to this year’s theme engaged with privilege and position in global medieval cultures. The Sewanee Medieval Colloquium provides a space for interdisciplinary scholars and audiences to discuss topics ranging from ecclesiastical and royal hierarchies, the production of artistic forms, analysis of international trade, the literature of class, status, or caste identity, the structures of visual or musical composition, ordering of public space, to popular medievalism from any geographic area.

 

Professor Daniel Melamed’s “‘Parallel Proportions in J. S. Bach’s Music'”

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Congratulations to Professor Daniel Melamed, whose article “‘Parallel Proportions’ in J. S. Bach’s Music” was published in the journal Eighteenth-Century Music. The article investigates a theory put forward in recent studies that finds relationships and significance in the numbers of measures in Bach’s compositions. In his discussion of the theory and its problems, Prof. Melamed investigates the mathematical and musical assumptions behind these claims, and finds that chance and the properties of numbers fully explain the relationships. This makes it difficult to sustain assertions that Bach intended these proportions or that they carried symbolic meaning for him.

(Click here to access the article.)

Dr. Halina Goldberg’s “Chopin’s Album Leaves and the Aesthetics of Musical Album Inscription” in JAMS

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Prof. Halina Goldberg, IU Musicology

Congratulations to Dr. Halina Goldberg whose article, “Chopin’s Album Leaves and the Aesthetics of Musical Album Inscription,” is featured in the Journal of American Musicology. Dr. Goldberg’s article addresses the presence of musical compositions and inscriptions from Romantic-era music enthusiasts and composers, including Schubert, Schumann, Wieck Schumann, Mendelssohn, Mendelssohn Hensel, Liszt, and Chopin, in friendship albums. She illuminates how musical and textual contributions interacted within the Romantic culture of collectorship. The article investigates how contributed compositions and musical fragments were shaped in the context of gift exchange in addition to how albums created a space for uncensored political and national discourse. (Click here to access the article!)

Publication and Performances of late IU Musicology Professor Walter Kaufmann’s Compositions

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The compositions of late IU Musicology Professor Walter Kaufmann have been subject of renewed interest from performers, publishers and audiences. Some of his works have been recently recorded by ARC Ensemble (CHANDOS). Now Doblinger Musikverlag is embarking on a project to publish his large compositions, many of which remain in manuscript at the Walter Kaufmann Archives at IU’s Cook Music Library.

Walter Kaufmann (1907-1984), hailing from Karlsbad, studied music in Berlin with Franz Schreker and Curt Sachs, and later under Gustav Becking and Paul Nettl in Prague. Not long after having completed his dissertation on Gustav Mahler, Kaufmann was forced to seek refuge from Nazi persecution in Bombay, where he worked as a director of music at the All India Radio from 1937 to 1946. After a year in England as a guest conductor at the BBC, Kaufmann accepted a position as a professor of piano and composition at the Halifax Conservatory of Music in 1947. Kaufmann married pianist Freda Trepel, his frequent musical collaborator in 1951. In 1957, Walter and Freda moved permanently to Bloomington, IN, where Kaufmann served as Professor of Musicology at Indiana University from 1957 to 1977. During his career at IU, he continued to compose and his works were often performed by musicians from the School of Music, including his opera The Scarlet Letter.

Professor Kaufmann remained an active member of the Musicology Department until his death in 1984. His scores can be found in The Kaufmann Archive at the William and Gayle Cook Music Library at Indiana University, in Harvard University’s Houghton Library, and in the Moldenhauer Archives in Spokane, Washington.

Professor Jill Rogers featured on BBC Radio 3 Interview

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Prof. Jillian Rogers
Jillian Rogers,
Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music

On February 27, 2021, Professor Jill Roger’s was featured in an interview on BBC Radio 3’s Music Matters, in which she discussed her recently-published book, Resonant Recoveries: French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars (Oxford University Press). Released in January 2021, Resonant Recoveries offers a new perspective on interwar French music and demonstrates that music is an important source of consolation in people’s lives during difficult times.

The BBC Radio 3’s Music Matters features musicians and educators sharing their hopes, expectations, and concerns for the future of musical activity in light of the pandemic. In her interview, Prof. Rogers describes how sound played a role in healing throughout the interwar period in France and draws parallels with today’s world during the Covid-19 era. The entire show is available here and the segment with Prof. Rogers takes place from 32:23 to 42:45.

Congratulations, Prof. Rogers!

IU Musicology hosts Dietmar Friesenegger

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On Wednesday, March 31, the Indiana University Department of Musicology, along with the Robert F. Byrnes Russian and East European Institute, Borns Jewish Studies Program, and the Institute for European Studies will host Dietmar Friesenegger as he delivers his lecture, “Regional Identity, Conflict, and the Nation State: The Four Lives of a Borderland Cantata.”

The presentation will address how music transcends national and linguistic boundaries while promoting national identification by exploring multiple performances (from 1889 to 2018) of Eusebius Mandyczewski’s In Bukovina. The cantata, written to celebrate a contested province in the Eastern European borderlands, was presented in three different countries — Austria-Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine —  and in three different languages — German, Romanian, and Ukrainian — yet they all happened in a single city, Czernowitz.

Dr. Friesenegger holds a PhD in musicology from Cornell University and currently serves as Lecturer in the Department of Musicology at the University of Vienna and Lecturer in the Department of German Studies at the University of Iasi (Romania). His scholarship focuses on contested areas of Eastern Europe and how music has been forgotten, erased, or rewritten in nationalizing histories. His research also concerns musicians with ties to multiple cultures, their compositions in several languages, and their music for various religious denominations.

Registration information and additional details can be found here.

Recent Publication of “Descriptive Piano Fantasias”

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Congratulations to Professors Halina Goldberg and Jonathan D. Bellman whose anthology, Descriptive Piano Fantasias, was recently published by A-R Editions. These critical performing editions are prepared by researchers and include commentary on historical context and performance practice to aid scholars and performers alike.

Descriptive Piano Fantasias contains once popular but forgotten compositions from the late eighteenth through nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These pieces, ubiquitous throughout Europe and the United States, were often based on historical and fictional events and mainly addressed to amateur pianists.

The original cover lithograph of Ludwik Gliński’s La bataille de Grochow et Praga (1831), published in the anthology, courtesy of Warsaw, Biblioteka Narodowa.

 

The anthology offers insights into compositional techniques found in canonic repertory, including the music of Fryderyk Chopin, Franz Liszt, and Johannes Brahms, while shedding light on historical listening practices. Exploring this genre helps to contextualize nineteenth-century aesthetic debates of descriptive versus idealistic music (and later programmatic versus absolute music). This repertory also highlights music’s role in depictions of political events and national sentiments.

The edition is available here.

CFP: 2021 Caswell Award for Undergraduate Projects in Music History

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The Austin B. Caswell award was established in 1998 in honor of Prof. Caswell, a devoted teacher and member of the musicology faculty at Indiana University from 1966 until his retirement in 1996. The Caswell Award recognizes the two best undergraduate music history projects (such as research papers, podcasts, and lecture-recitals) submitted at the Jacobs School of Music each year.

ELIGIBILITY

Students may nominate their own projects. Alternatively, students’ projects may be nominated or encouraged by faculty members, associate instructors, and classmates. To be eligible for this year’s award, a project must have been submitted in fulfillment of course requirements for a music history class during the 2020 calendar year. You may revise the project before submitting it for the award (that is, it is not required that the version submitted be exactly what was turned in for a grade).

A student need not be currently enrolled as an IU undergraduate in order to be eligible to submit a project; for example, a student who submitted a project for M402 in spring 2020 may have since graduated, but is still eligible to submit that project for consideration. Each student may submit only one project.

PRIZE

Each winner will receive a certificate and $250 award. Winners are typically recognized at the Jacobs School of Music commencement reception but, as with all things, the situation will be different this year. The IU Department of Musicology will also post an award announcement on its website.

DEADLINE

Submissions must be received by 5:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 1, 2021.

HOW TO APPLY

Complete the electronic submission form. For papers, upload a clean PDF version (without comments from instructors or editorial marks), identified by title only (not by student name). For research projects delivered in podcast or lecture-recital formats, please submit the written script and final audio file with student names removed.

Submitted projects will be read and judged by a committee of faculty members in the Musicology Department. The committee will not consider submissions that arrive after the deadline or that fail to meet the submission guidelines. If you have questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to the musicology department at musicol@indiana.edu.