On Friday and Saturday, March 31 and April 1, the Graduate Musicology Association (GMA) and Graduate Theory Association (GTA) hosted the Twenty-Ninth Annual Symposium of Research in Music. The symposium featured twelve student presentations, organized into panels on topics such as “Music and Multimedia: New Perspectives,” “Rhythm, Meter, Harmony,” “Embodiment and Entanglement,” and “Playing with Meaning and Memory.”

In addition to these panels, there were two roundtable discussions held at the symposium. IU Musicology students Miguel Arango Calle and Travis Whaley led the session on “Notation and the Body,” while IU Theory student Jack Bussert chaired the discussion on “Analytical Applications of Intonation Theory.”Each year the IU student body nominates speakers to give featured presentations at the symposium. This year’s lineup was a trio of IU’s own professors, including Dr. Peter Burkholder, who opened the event with his talk, “Making Old Music New: Performing, Arranging, Borrowing, Schemas, Topics, Intertextuality.” Dr. Orit Hilewicz presented on “Luciano Berio’s Compositional Poetics as Performance,” and Dr. Andrew Mead gave his talk, “Unfinished Business.”

Join us next Wednesday, March 29th, to hear from guest lecturer and Indiana University alumnus, Derek Stauff, who will be presenting his talk, entitled, “Reading Psalm 15 as Dialogue: Sebastian Knüpfer’s ‘Herr, wer wird wohnen?’ and its Models”. The event will take place at 3:00 PM in room M350 (Simon Music Center).

Wednesday, March 29 | 3:00 pm
Room M350, Simon Music Center.
Derek Stauff (Hillsdale College), “Reading Psalm 15 as Dialogue: Sebastian Knüpfer’s ‘Herr, wer wird wohnen?’ and its Models”.

Derek Stauff is an associate professor of music at Hillsdale College (Michigan), teaching music history and organ. In 2014 he completed his Ph.D. in musicology from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, with a dissertation on music, confession, and politics during the Thirty Years War, written under Professor Melamed. His ongoing research on this topic has been published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Schütz-Jahrbuch, the Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, and Bach Perspectives. He has also edited or is in the process of editing editions of music by several composers working in seventeenth-century Leipzig.

Abstract:

Knüpfer’s sacred concerto on Psalm 15 (“Herr, wer wird wohnen?”), which survives in a single manuscript score from the 1690s (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Mus. ms. 11780), ranks as one of the most interesting on this text from the seventeenth century. Apart from issues of sources, dating, and attribution, research on this largely unknown piece has allowed a thorough assessment of its stylistic models and influence. The concerto’s dialogue scoring and refrain-like structure turn out to mirror many earlier settings of this psalm, particularly by Andreas Hammerschmidt, yet Knüpfer achieves something new and grander than any of his possible models, German or Latin.

Like earlier composers, Knüpfer interprets the psalm as a dialogue between unnamed interlocutors (here canto and alto) and God (bass), a decision rooted in the psalm itself, whose opening verse poses two questions to God (“Lord, who shall dwell in your tabernacle? Who shall remain on your holy mountain?”) followed by a string of answers. Many settings, including those by Schütz, Samuel Michael, Scheidt, Hammerschmidt, Pohle, Bernhard, Ritter, and Knüpfer, expand the dialogue by interlacing verse 1 as a refrain between later verses, providing a regular exchange between interlocutors not found in the psalm text. Knüpfer’s concerto and two by Hammerschmidt also add a second refrain, verse 5b, inserting it between the psalm’s middle verses in addition to its rightful place at the conclusion. Some of Knüpfer’s potential models handle these repetitions with sophistication, yet Knüpfer stands out, particularly in the ways he varies his refrains and links them musically. His counterpoint and careful instrumentation also outpace the rest. All these features make Knüpfer’s psalm concerto a notable contribution to what we must acknowledge as a broader tradition of dialogue settings on Psalm 15, a text not normally even classified as dialogue.

Sergio Ospina Romero, Assistant Professor in Musicology, is one of eight IU Faculty members to receive an inaugural IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship, a program that “aims to accelerate and amplify the work of outstanding IU faculty poised to become national and international leaders in their fields.” Thanks to this support, Prof. Ospina Romero has invited two outstanding scholars to deliver talks on Wednesday and Thursday, March 22 and 23.

David Suisman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Delaware and the author of the awarded and widely read book Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music. On March 23, he will present “‘Music and Guns Go Hand in Hand’: World War I and the Sonic History of American Warfare,” a preview of his current book project (to be published in 2024 by the University of Chicago Press): Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers, a path-breaking study of the ways music has enabled U.S. war-making from the Civil War to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Thursday, March 23 | 5:00 pm
Gayle Karch Cook Center Grand Hall, Maxwell Hall
David Suisman (University of Delaware), “‘Music and Guns Go Hand in Hand’: World War I and the Sonic History of American Warfare”

Frederick Schenker is Assistant Professor of Music at St. Lawrence University. His talk on March 24 will be titled “The Filipino Fox-trot”: Manila’s Markets for Popular Music,” an exploration of “how Manila’s popular music composers of the 1920s grappled with the imperial circulation of U.S. popular music as a force that was simultaneously dominating and enabling,” as well as how local musicians transcended the political limits of U.S. pop by reworking these styles as revolutionary music while engaging and competing with North American and European businesses in the new arena of modern popular entertainment.

Friday, March 24 | 12:30pm
Room M344, Simon Music Center
Musicology Colloquium Series
Frederick Schenker (St. Lawrence University), “‘The Filipino Fox-trot’: Manila’s Popular Song Industry in the 1920s”

In addition to the talks, Schenker and Suisman, along with Suzanne Ryan Melamed (former Editor in Chief at Oxford University Press), will hold a book workshop with Prof. Ospina Romero. His book, Talking Machine Empires: Phonograph Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean during the Acoustic Era, will be the first comprehensive study of the sound recording industry between 1877 and 1925, before the advent of microphones, loudspeakers, and electrical recording.

These activities are sponsored by the Indiana University Arts and Humanities Presidential Fellowship and the Department of Musicology. Email musicol@indiana.edu with questions.

Last month, the musicology department and the Latin American Music Center partnered up to present the event series Sounding Latinidades: Exploring Ainadamar in preparation for the opening of Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar at IU. Adjunct professor of Musicology and Music in General Studies, Christine Wisch, opened the series on January 23rd with her lecture “The Musical Language of Osvaldo Golijov’s ‘Ainadamar'” in which she explored how Golijov brings different musical worlds together to create a powerful score. The series continued with a presentation and discussion on Flamenco music and culture in Ainadamar, presented by flamenco singer and scholar Alfonso Cid. Composer Osvaldo Golijov was additionally invited to Professor Wisch’s Introduction to Latin American Art Music class where he answered questions submitted by students. 

Aindamar opened on Friday, February 3rd, and was met with vibrant praise from the audience. After the show, Professor Wisch and Osvaldo Golijov were joined by six other contributors for a post-performance “Talkback” giving audience members the opportunity to ask questions and interact with the composer, artistic team, and performers. Conductor David Neely, stage director Jeffrey Buchman, choreographer Rosa Mercedes, vocalist Gavin Hughes, dancer Jayda Hazelett, and cajón player Thomas Frost, discussed their personal relationship to the work and the process of incorporating flamenco techniques into their otherwise predominantly classical training. As the 2023 performances marked the first time IU presented a fully-staged version of Ainadamar, audiences were eager to learn about the opera and also completely filled the pre-concert talks with standing room only on all four nights. 

Dr. Wisch, a 2022 graduate of the musicology Ph.D. program, was an important contributor to the series and a primary contact for Golijov during his visit. Like many historians, musicologists often become more accustomed to working with documents than people. For Wisch, the opportunity to form such close relationships with the composer, director, and cast was a unique and unforgettable experience. Wisch remarked that “we rarely get to meet the people behind the music we love and study, and in the case of Golijov, I have been overjoyed with getting to know him and discover that his creative brilliance is equally matched by his kindness and sincerity.”

Professor Christine Wisch presented the pre-performance lectures, and first-year musicology PhD student Monika Franaszczuk wrote the program notes. Both contributors are dual musicologists and affiliates of the Latin American Music Center. 

Congratulations to Professor Philip Ford and his podcasting partner JF Martel on the latest review of their podcast Weird Studies in the London Times, receiving 4 stars from critic James Marriott. This review comes on the tail of another recent write-up in The New York Times this past summer, which similarly recommended the podcast to its readers.

Weird Studies was first produced in 2018 and is self-described by its hosts as “a series of conversations on art and philosophy, dwelling on ideas that are hard to think and art that opens up rifts in what we are pleased to call ‘reality.’” In the London Times article, Marriott equates the podcast to “bumping into two of your favorite professors who are slightly stoned at the end of a party.” He commends the hosts on their informal yet informed banter over topics ranging from mustaches to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album.

Weird Studies is unique not just because of the eclectic erudition of its hosts, but for the philosophy underpinning the project, which Ford describes as a “commitment to maintaining a place in intellectual life for spiritual and even occult influences”. Indeed, the rejection of strict positivism opens up the conversational space for the hosts to blend their idiosyncratic views on science, intuition, and mysticism. As a public-facing site of scholarship, Ford hopes to develop podcasting into “a legitimate medium for scholarly work”, a commendable aim in a time when podcasts and other media are becoming increasingly valued as alternatives to a traditionally exclusive form of academia.

Since 2020, the podcast has also provided valuable production experience for IU Musicology Ph.D. student Meredith Michael. Meredith has served primarily as a production assistant but also occasionally joins Ford and Martel “on the mic” – check out Episode 140: That Ain’t Plot: On Hayao Miyazaki’s ‘Spirited Away’ — as well as with special projects, like the recovered Lost Episode.

Weird Studies is available on most audio listening platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, and Stitcher.