Dr. Lucas, Ms. Gaetgaeow, and Dr. Nguyen
The musicology program proudly recognizes our fall 2018 graduates: Ph.D. recipients, Dr. Sarah Lucas and Dr. Hang Nguyen, and master’s degree recipients, Lily Gaetgaeow and C.A. Norling. Congratulations on a job well done!
The musicology faculty and students at the University of Iowa are looking forward to the fourth annual Iowa Musicology Day, to be held on April 14. The conference will be held in Room 2 (the Choral Room) of the Voxman Music Building. The conference is free and open to Iowans interested in musicology.
Conference Schedule
9:00 Registration and morning refreshments
Megan Small, University of Iowa, “On the Sunset Trail: The West in Iowa”
11:30- 1:00 Box Lunch (see below)
Marian Wilson Kimber, University of Iowa, “‘It’s up to the women’: Women’s Peace Songs for Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1930s”
Nathan Platte, University of Iowa, “Jazz and the Ethics of Authenticity in I Want to Live!”
3:30- 4:30 Session 5: Introduction to the Arthur and Miriam Canter Rare Book Room, Katie Buehner, Music Librarian, Rita Benton Music Library
More Conference Information
Wednesday, March 21, 4 pm, in Vox 2. In cooperation with the European Studies program of the University of Iowa, the Musicology and Music Theory Colloquium will present a special lecture by Anna Leonard, Lecturer and curator Curator of European Art at the Smart Museum of Art of the University of Chicago. Leonard specializes in 19th-century European art, particularly that of France and Belgium. Her research interests include Symbolism and Wagnerism, attention and modes of aesthetic experience, time in painting, and nationalism and internationalism. A primary area of scholarly focus has been the relations between visual art and music, which are the subject of a book she co-edited with musicologist Tim Shephard, The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture (2014), the first comprehensive reference work in this field. She has published six exhibition catalogues at the Smart Museum, chapters in several edited volumes, and an article in the Art Bulletin. Leonard’s presentation is entitled “Present at the Creation: The Romantic Iconography of the Turned Canvas,” and the abstract follows.
Abstract: This paper addresses the motif of the turned canvas or canvas seen from the back, found in certain portraits of artists at work c. 1810–25, as a manifestation of Romantic theories of the work of art. The turned canvas invited beholders to complete the concealed work of art in their imaginations, just as artistic creation itself was viewed at the time as a largely internal process rather than a physical or manual one. My presentation explores the implications of these ideas for Romantic representations of artists at work. It pays special consideration to what were perceived to be the raw materials of creative inspiration, not just for painters but for composers as well. Evidence shows that the conception of painting as an imitation of nature—prevalent in classical aesthetics from the Renaissance onward, and particularly the seventeenth century—underwent significant revision in the Romantic period, drawing closer to non-mimetic processes of musical creation. The phenomenon of Beethoven portraiture is brought in to show how understandings of his compositional process not only influenced the representation of pictorial artists but also encouraged a redefinition of the work of art, following musical paradigms, as something essentially immaterial and even invisible.
Andrew Tubbs, Arthur Scoleri, C. A. Norling, Dr. Sarah Suhadolnik, and Lisa Mumme, ready to hit the road for SAM
Musicology students and faculty attended the annual meeting of the Society for American Music, held in Kansas City, February 28 through March 4. Professor Sarah Suhadolnik appeared as a speaker for a workshop, organized by the Committee on the Conference, entitled “Strategies for Designing, Doing, and Discussing Digital Humanities Projects.” Professor Marian Wilson Kimber, along with doctoral piano student Natalie Landowski, presented a lecture-recital, “In a Woman’s Voice: Spoken-Word Compositions by American Women.” The recital highlighted compositions discussed in her recent book, The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word (University of Illinois Press, 2017). At the student lunch and business meeting, master’s student Andrew Tubbs was elected co-chair of SAM’s student forum for the upcoming year. Congratulations Andrew!
Amy Beach (Courtesy of UNH Library, Dimond Special Collections)
Professor of Musicology Marian Wilson Kimber was interviewed by the Associated Press about the 150th anniversary of the birthday of composer Amy Beach, and her comments appeared in an article in the Washington Post. Wilson Kimber was one of multiple scholars from American, Mexico, Chile, and Venezuela, who spoke at the American Women Pianist-Composers conference celebrating Amy Beach and Teresa Carreño, hosted by the University of New Hampshire on September 15-16. The University’s Milne Library and Dimond Special Collections houses the papers of Amy Beach and presented an exhibition of rare Beach materials in conjunction with the conference. Beach was the first American female composer to be successful in composing large forms, including her Gaelic Symphony. Wilson Kimber presented her research into Beach’s appearances at the White House in 1934 and 1936 in recitals for First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, along with other women composers from the National League of American Pen Women.
Professor Christine Getz was awarded a 2017 Venetian Programs Grant from the Gladys Kriebel Delmas Foundation to support research in Venice and Padova for the project, “Venetian Investors, Spanish Clients, and the Milanese Music Prints of Lomazzo and Tini.” The research is part of a larger study of the investments, economic relationships, and marketing strategies of the printing houses of , the heirs of Simone Tini and Filippo Lomazzo, and the family Tradate, all prolific publishers of printed music books in early modern Milan.With the support of the Delmas Grant, Prof. Getz will examine notarial documents housed in the Archivio di Stato in Venice pertaining to business transactions between Venetian printers and vendors and the Tini and Tradate families. She also will study the only extant copy of a Lomazzo print recently acquired by the Conservatorio “Cesare Pollini” in Padova.
The spring conference season has been an especially active one for Iowans this year. The majority of the musicology faculty and students have been on the road at least once to present their research. Doctoral student Kelsey McGinnis presented “The Purest Pieces of Home: German POWs Making German Music in America” in Montréal at the Society for American Music meeting. Master’s students Andrew Tubbs and Arthur Scoleri also traveled to present papers, Tubbs at the conference Music and Action held at UCLA, where he gave “Reclaiming Their History: a Disabled Re-positioning of Cabaret.” Scoleri spoke on “Alcina and the Illusory Heart: Exploring Gender and Emotion in G.F. Handel’s Opera Seria” at NCounters: Engaging Music Research + Practice, held in Edmonton, Alberta. Two musicology students presented papers at the Midwest Graduate Music Consortium at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Master’s student C.A. Norling gave “An Atmosphere of the West: Highlighting the Exotic in Puccini’s La fanciulla del west,” and Tubbs presented “Cripface: Overcoming Disability and Finding a Musical Voice in The King’s Speech.”
Closer to home, two Iowa faculty members and one student presented papers at the spring meeting of the Midwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society, held at Drake University on April 22. Prof. Nathan Platte gave “‘Sounds Must Stir the Fantasy’: Underscore as Special Effect in The Wizard of Oz (1939),” and Prof. Marian Wilson Kimber’s paper was “Reciting Parsifal: Opera as Spoken Word Performance in America.” Kelsey McGinnis presented “‘Our thoughts were with those back home’: German POWs Making German Music in Iowa.”
The third annual Iowa Musicology Day took place on April 6 at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids and featured two Iowa faculty and four student presentations, including:
Jared Hedges, “George Crumb’s ‘Attitudes of Variation’ in Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik”
David Lim, “Programmatic Considerations in Julius Reubke’s Organ Sonata on Psalm 94”
Andrew Tubbs, “In Search of Balance: Inversional Symmetry, Tonal Problems, and Disability Aesthetics in Schoenberg’s ‘Valse de Chopin’”
Prof. Trevor Harvey appeared on the culminating panel for the day, “Strengths and Challenges in Teaching College-Level ‘Music Appreciation’ as General Education Courses,” speaking about his “Great Musicians” course for general education students at the University of Iowa.
The last week of April, Prof. Wilson Kimber traveled to the University of Delaware to speak about Felix Mendelssohn’s string quartets before the final performance of the complete cycle of quartets, including the Octet, performed by the Calidore Quartet with Delaware’s Seraphim Quartet. The same week, Prof. Platte was a guest speaker for the Musicology Colloquium at Northwestern University, where he presented “The Trouble with Onscreen Orchestrators: Progeny and Compositional Crisis in the Four Daughters Films.”
[Photo courtesy of 42N Observations]
New master’s student in musicology, Cody Norling, has won the National Opera Association’s 2016 Scholarly Paper Competition for “Puccini’s Grotesque West: Exoticism and Appropriating in La fanciulla del west.” He has been invited to read his paper at the NOA’s annual convention in Santa Barbara, California, in January 2017 and to publish his paper in its 
Opera Journal. Cody’s paper addresses American Indian depictions in Puccini’s Gold Rush drama, La fanciulla del west. In doing so, he highlights the opera’s two indigenous characters, Wowkle and Billy Jackrabbit, and compares their portrayal to the setting’s historical realities. He concludes that their text and music have little connection to the composer’s attempted authenticities but rather rely solely on a stereotyped exotic image.
Nathan Platte’s essay,”‘The Epic and Intimately Human’: Contemplating the Tara Theme in Gone With the Wind,” was just published in Music in Epic Film: Listening to Spectacle (Routledge, 2016). (https://www.routledge.com/Music-in-Epic-Film-Listening-to-Spectacle/Meyer-Lerner/p/book/9781315690025) In preparing this article, Platte visited three different archives: the Warner Bros. Archive at the University of Southern California, the Max Steiner Papers at Brigham Young University, and the David O. Selznick Collection at the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas at Austin). By fitting together the archival pieces dispersed among these collections, Platte came to realize that “Hollywood’s best-known melody has a backstory of its own, replete with humble origins, daunting adversities, and startling transformations.” The essay has already been cited in Mark Richards’s ambitious study for Music Theory Online: “Film Music Themes: Analysis and Corpus Study.” (http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.16.22.1/mto.16.22.1.richards.html)H
Professor Christine Getz has received a 2016 Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society.
The Franklin program is designed in part to help meet the costs of travel to libraries and archives for research purposes. Getz will use the grant to travel to Italy for her current project, “Economic Partnerships, Marketing Strategies, and International Relations in the Music Prints of Filippo Lomazzo.”
By the early 17th century the music printing industry had begun to languish across the Italian peninsula. Yet between 1602 and 1630 the firm of Filippo Lomazzo in Milan issued at least 90 volumes of part music. A survey of the Lomazzo prints indicates that his contacts included not only Milanese composers, performers, booksellers, collectors, and patrons, but also internationally recognized ones. It further suggests that the firm considered how practical use of the music contained was best married to trends in producing books in related disciplines.
Using archival sources and printed books, Getz’s project explores how Lomazzo cultivated relationships with North Italian merchants, connoisseurs, and musicians, forged international relations with composers, collectors, and patrons, and exploited emerging trends in the organization and production of devotional literature, encyclopedias, travel guides, and histories to build a highly successful music printing business in early modern Milan.
Academic Music @ UIowa 
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