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Musicology Indiana University Bloomington

Stewart Duncan’s “An Excellent Piece of Propaganda”

Posted on by smsabol

PhD candidate Stewart Duncan’s article “‘An Excellent Piece of Propaganda’: The British Council’s Use of Choirs as Cultural Diplomacy in the 1930s” was published in the January 2022 issue of The Musical Quarterly. Congratulations Stewart!

His article focuses on the anxiety the British government felt in the interwar period upon realizing that other countries, such as Italy and Germany, were making cultural inroads in Central and Eastern Europe, and how the British Council engaged in cultural diplomacy through musical propaganda, primarily using touring English choirs, which were viewed by the Council as emblematic of national identity. Stewart concentrates on the three choirs sent on tours by the Council–the Choir of Kings College, Cambridge; the New English Singers; and the Fleet Street Choir–and the values these ensembles embodied.

Read Stewart’s article here (note that Oxford Academic requires a log-in).

 

CFP: 2022 Caswell Award for Undergraduate Projects in Music History

Posted on by Sarah J. Slover

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 2021 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 2021 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, March 10, 2022.

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.

Prof. Halina Goldberg Wins 2021 H. Colin Slim Award at AMS

Posted on by Sarah J. Slover

Congratulations to IU Professor of Musicology Halina Goldberg, who has just won the 2021 H. Colin Slim Award from the American Musicological Society. Her award-winning article, titled “Chopin’s Album Leaves and the Aesthetics of Musical Album Inscription,” was published earlier this year in the Journal of the American Musicological Society.

Each year, the H. Colin Slim Award honors a musicological article of “exceptional merit” that is published during the previous year. The award committee chooses a single winner from nominations in any language and from any country, as long as they are a member of AMS or a citizen or permanent resident of Canada or the United States.

From the AMS awards page: Tapping a previously unexplored and extensive primary source base that was ephemeral and had been feminized, the author of this article convincingly builds an argument that takes the reader from small moments of interpersonal interaction to the overarching theme of national identity. Centering her exploration on musical album inscriptions in the musical world of the Polish composer, Frédéric Chopin, the author establishes networks of interpersonal exchange around these albums that connected composers, patrons, and consumers. Paying scrupulous attention to details, her rich referential matrix situates Chopin’s album inscriptions in a cosmopolitan habitus, shedding new light on their musical meaning and the stylistic genres from which they are derived, all conditioned by gift-exchange etiquette. The research is impressive and offers a multi-disciplinary critical framework, reflecting the author’s deep knowledge of musical repertoire, long engagement with archival sources, reading across a large and multidisciplinary secondary source base, and careful interpretation.

AMS 2021: IU Musicology Events and Presentations

Posted on by Sarah J. Slover

(Current Indiana University faculty, students, and alumni.)
PLEASE NOTE: All times are CST

Thursday, November 11

12:00 pm       Devon R. Nelson, “Preserving Authenticity and Exposing Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain” | Forgery and Deception

1:00 pm         Nicolette van den Bogerd, “The Composer as Intellectual: Biblical Interpretation and Jewish Martyrdom in Alexandre Tansman’s Isaïe le prophète” | European Jews in Exile

2:00 pm        Jillian Rogers, roundtable speaker | Beyond Objectivity: Embracing Activism in Scholarship and Teaching

3:00 pm        Ayana Smith, roundtable/professional development speaker | Antiracist Pedagogies in the Music History Classroom

4:00 pm        Mollie Ables (Wabash College), professional development session | Teaching (Outside the Canon & Textbook) with Digital Tools & Projects (AMS Committee on Technology)

6:00 pm        Kerry O’Brien (Cornish College of the Arts), “Jill Johnston’s Closet Criticism” | New Directions in Queer Music Scholarship (LGBTQ Study Group)

Friday, November 12

10:00 am      Virginia Whealton (Texas Tech University), “The Myers Family Music Collection: Mercantile Sociability, Cultural Ambition, and Jewish Identity in Early Nineteenth-Century Norfolk, Virginia”

11:00 am       Grace Pechianu, “War of the Waves: Radio Free Europe’s Crusade for Freedom in Early Socialist Romania” | On the Radio Session

6:00 pm        Giovanni Zanovello, Erika Honisch (Stony Brook University), and Deanna Pellerano, “Mapping Inclusive Early Music” | Early Musics in the 21st Century: Skills and Resources (Skills and Resources in Early Music Study Group)

7-9 pm          IU Musicology Reception (Zoom: email musicol@indiana.edu for information). This event is open to all who wish to attend, including prospective students, alumni, and anyone who wants to stop by and say hello!

Wednesday, November 17

5-6 pm           Graduate Student Open House (Zoom: email miarango@iu.edu for information). Several of our current graduate students will be available via Zoom to meet prospective students and talk with them about the program.

Thursday, November 18

5-6 pm           IU Musicology Open House Q&A Session. The Admissions Committee of the IU Musicology Department will hold an open-house Q & A session with prospective applicants. They will talk about our selection criteria, and will answer questions regarding our review process. Register via Zoom.

Saturday, November 20

11:00 am       Kirby Haugland, “La famiglia Svizzera and Operatic Genre in Dresden and Milan” | Italian Opera at Home and Abroad

2:00 pm        Marysol Quevedo (University of Miami), “Postmodern Water Music: Leo Brouwer’s Canción de Gesta” | U.S.-Latin American Relations

2-3:30 pm     AMS Prospective Graduate Students Reception. Representatives of our department will be available to answer your questions during this event, hosted by the AMS Graduate Education Committee.

3:00 pm        Chelsey Belt, “Performing Humanism: Nostalgia for a Poetic Golden Age in Early Seventeenth-Century Solo Song” | French and Italian Song, 1600-1700 Session

Sunday, November 21

4:00 pm        Sergio Ospina Romero, “The Jazz Age in the Caribbean: Musical Transactions and Jazz Modalities in New Orleans, Havana, and Beyond” | Caribbean Crossings Session

5:00 pm        Molly C. Doran (Wartburg College), “Performing Ophelia’s Pain: The Ethics of Women’s Trauma on the 21st-Century Opera Stage” | Sexuality and Gender in Contemporary Opera Session

Week of November 15-19

Individual Meetings with IU Musicology Faculty – by appointment. Our faculty will be happy to meet one-on-one with applicants to discuss the program and answer questions. Please email them individually to set up Zoom appointments. Contact information can be found here.

  • Halina Goldberg, Chair: 19th- and 20th-century Poland and Eastern Europe, Chopin, cultural studies, music and politics, performance practice, reception, Jewish studies
  • Judah Cohen: Music in Jewish life, musical theatre, American music (19th–21st century), popular music, ethnomusicology, music historiography
  • Phil Ford: American popular music, cultural studies, sound and media, radical and counter-cultural intellectual history
  • Daniel R. Melamed: Baroque music, J. S. Bach, the Bach family, performance practice, 18th-century opera
  • Kristina Muxfeldt: Late 18th- and early 19th-century music and culture, Lieder, stage works, social history
  • Devon R. Nelson: Music and antiquarianism in Britain, music printing, early-modern music and dance, connections between music and drink
  • Massimo Ossi: Renaissance and Baroque music, early 17th-century Italian music theory and aesthetics, Italian lyric poetry and madrigal 1550–1650, Vivaldi
  • Sergio Ospina Romero: Sound reproduction, jazz, Latin American music, transnationalism in the early 20th century
  • Jillian Rogers: French modernism, music and trauma studies, affect and psychoanalytic theory, sound studies
  • Ayana Smith: Baroque music; opera, aesthetics, and visual culture (1650–1750); race and representation in music history pedagogy; women and gender in music
  • Giovanni Zanovello: early music, Renaissance music, 15th-century Italian musical institutions, Florence, music and learning, Heinrich Isaac, Inclusive Early Music

Author, Poet, and Concept Artist Esther Dischereit Coming to IU

Posted on by Sarah J. Slover

“Jews, Memory, and Inclusion,” a Guest & Student Recital featuring Esther Dischereit and student performers from the Jacobs School of Music, will be presented in Auer Hall and via Zoom on Sunday, Nov. 7, at 4pm

Join us for an evocative performance featuring poet Esther Dischereit and Jacobs School dancers and instrumentalists who will improvise to poetry. The poet and performers will tackle issues of anti-Semitism and alienation and will welcome discussion and questions.

“Jews, Memory, and Inclusion”
A Jacobs Community Conversation Guest & Student Performance
Sunday, November 7, 2021
4:00–5:30 PM
Auer Hall & Zoom
Details here, Register here

Esther Dischereit is a world-acclaimed writer of novels, short stories, essays, poetry, and plays for radio and the stage. Based in Berlin, Dischereit is a leading voice among German-Jewish writers and an important commentator on current events in German public media. Flowers for Otello: On the Crimes that Came out of Jena will be brought out in English translation by The University of Chicago Press in Spring 2022. Her prose works include Joëmis Tisch – Eine jüdische Geschichte (1988) (English title: Joëmi’s Table), Übungen jüdisch zu sein (1996) (English title: Lessons in Being Jewish). In 2020 she published Sometimes a Single Leaf, a book of German poetry with English translations by Iain Galbraith, and a collection of essays entitled Mama darf ich das Deutschlandlied singen (Mama, May I Sing the German National Anthem). Her book Have no fear, Tell everything: the Halle Synagogue Terror Attack and the Voice of the Survivors was published in 2021.

Jacobs Student Performers:
Maeve Whelan, viola
Sol Keim, flute/saxophone
Joaquin Ruiz, dancer
Ruth Connelly, dancer
Natalia Garcia, dancer

Moderators:
Judah Cohen
Halina Goldberg

This event is co-hosted by the JSOM Diversity and Equity Committee, the Musicology Department, the Borns Jewish Studies Program, and Germanic Studies Department.

Daniel Bishop’s New Monograph: The Presence of the Past

Posted on by smsabol

Congratulations to Daniel Bishop, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Music (Music in General Studies) at Indiana University Bloomington and alumnus of the Musicology PhD program! His book, The Presence of the Past: Temporal Experience and the New Hollywood Soundtrack, was recently published by Oxford University Press. Bishop’s book focuses on the soundtracks of US films from the late sixties and early seventies that occupy a historical setting.

The abstract for The Presence of the Past can be found below, and the e-version of Bishop’s book can be accessed here (may require log-in credentials).

Abstract from Oxford Scholarship Online:

“In the tumultuous era of the late sixties and early seventies, several currents of American art and culture coalesced around a broad sensibility that foregrounded and explored the immediacy of lived experience as both an aesthetic and political imperative. But in films set in the historical past, this sensibility acquired complex additional resonances by speaking to the ephemerality of the present moment through a framework of history, myth, nostalgia, and other forms of temporal alienation and distance. The Presence of the Past explores the implications of this complex moment in Hollywood cinema through several prominent examples released in the years 1967 to 1974. Key genres are explored in detailed case studies: the outlaw film (Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands), the revisionist Western (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe and Mrs. Miller), the neo-noir (Chinatown), and the nostalgia film (The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti). In these films, “the past” is more than a matter of genre or setting. Rather, it is a richly diverse, often paradoxical concern in its own right, whose study bridges diverse conceptual territories within soundtrack studies, including the sixties pop score, myth criticism, media technologies, and the role of classical music in compilation scoring. Against a broader background of an industry and film culture that were witnessing a stylistic and aesthetic diversification in the use of music and sound design, The Presence of the Past argues for the film-philosophical importance of the soundtrack for cultivating an imagined experiential understanding of the past.”

Deanna Pellerano awarded Eileen Southern Travel Grant

Posted on by smsabol

This summer, Deanna Pellerano, who earned a dual masters degree in Musicology and Library Science from IU in Spring 2021, was announced as a recipient of the Eileen Southern Travel Fund, a grant of the American Musicological Society and their Committee on Cultural Diversity. The Eileen Southern Travel Fund seeks to support minority undergraduates and terminal masters degree students with funding for registration fees and travel expenses to the annual AMS conference, as well as connecting them with scholars, graduate programs, and interest groups.

Since the 2021 meeting is online, Deanna has been awarded registration to this year’s AMS Annual Meeting and will receive travel award for the 2022 Annual Meeting. Congratulations Deanna!

IU Musicology Graduate Student Recovers Lost Episode of Weird Studies

Posted on by Sarah J. Slover

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

Posted on by gpechian

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

Posted on by gpechian

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.