Benedictus and Baudelaire Come Together for an “Examination of Conscience at Midnight” in Jean-François Charles’s Music

Written in 2011 and recorded this year by Ligament—Anika Kildegaard (voice) and Will Yager (bass)—University of Iowa Assistant Professor Jean-François Charles’s “Benedictus” is a fitting song to listen to at a time when we are nearing the midnight of the year, to say nothing of midnight on the Doomsday Clock, which has been on the verge of twelve o’clock for so long that crisis seems to be a permanent state of affairs. Perpetual night seems like day, the forever war is the closest thing we have to peace, and constant gaslighting supplants truth. A fitting song, and a welcome song at a time when so much is coming into 20/20 focus that obliges us as individuals and as communities to examine our conscience.

I have certain thing for dark nights of the soul, and of the mind. I have been reviving evening viewings of Twin Peaks with my beautiful wife and discussing how it is a dark soap opera, a sort of cinematic mashup of film noir and soap opera. Charles’s song is similarly a mashup, and it is similarly almost cinematic in its cutting between a setting of text from the Roman Sanctus and a spliced-together setting of Charles Baudelaire’s “L’examen de minuit” from Les fleurs du mal—or, as rendered in William Aggeler’s translation, “Examination of Conscience at Midnight” from Flowers of Evil.

“Benedictus” begins with a single-second sample of a clock, which is referenced in the first line of the poem—an allusion perhaps to Pink Floyd’s “Time” (1973), which begins with a quiet ticking sound, and which is wrapped up in another sort of dark cinematic mashup (i.e., The Dark Side of Oz, about which I have written). Charles’s song further proceeds with a Pink-Floyd-like block of space music to clear the air and set the dark tone. The space is colored with an electric string bass, electroacoustic instruments being Charles’s specialty. The bass sounds intermittently through the song, as a kind of Greek chorus taking in the ironic display (irony is referenced in the second line of the poem). I will say a word about both display and irony.

Both songs (“Benedictus” and “Time”) put wasted, defiled time on display in a way that can shock the listener awake (the ticking in “Time” is followed by an alarm clock going off). The same, incidentally, is true of Swoope’s “Schizo / Hollow Dreams Interlude,” from the album Wake Up (2012). For exposure, hopefully, is what can overcome vice, within and without. As the poet acknowledges at the end of Baudelaire’s poem, in the voice of a conspirator, “Quickly let us snuff out the lamp, / So we may hide in the darkness!” (Vite soufflons la lampe, afin / De nous cacher dans les ténèbres).

The irony consists in the juxtapositions of the mashup in Charles’s song. The text from the Sanctus is a blessing of he who comes in the name of the Lord (benedictus qui venit in nomine domini)—i.e., Jesus, as the second stanza of Baudelaire’s poem explains. The first sounding of the benedictus music concludes not with the expected note but with a note just adjacent, which segues into Baudelaire’s poet’s confession of sins—sins that prevent as it were a complete sounding of the benedictus music with a clear conscience.

There is more to confession than just words, though, for even the demons name the “Son of the Most High God.” Confession is repentance, turning toward compunction instead of cynicism. Appropriately, then, the poem is set schizophrenically with two voices, so to speak, the one harsh and the other mournful, even wailing. And confession is recurrent, because there is always another layer to expose in the soul. Appropriately, then, the two voices alternate. And it is the mournful, repentant voice that is able, as it were, to lead back to the benedictus music, through the word “light” (lumière). These two voices together with that of the benedictus music may be likened to the proverbial devil and angel on our shoulders as we pray to God in our heads in between, or they may be likened to the foolish thief and the wise thief, who give contrasting responses to Jesus crucified between them.

Through their juxtaposition, these two voices draw sharp almost visual lines between the bright light of repentance and the “wan light of putrefaction” (de la putrefaction… la blafarde lumière). The latter phrase is reminiscent of Emanuel Swedenborg’s discussion of people who think they are wise and good from themselves, rather than the opposite, being themselves from wisdom and goodness. He describes this mistake as that the people “close the higher regions of their mind…. Since the higher regions of their mind are closed, where the true light of life makes its home, a lower region of their mind opens up that is attuned only to the glimmer of the world. That glimmer, devoid of light from the higher regions, is faint and deceptive.” This attunement focuses purely on, as the poem says, “stupid and unfeeling Matter” (la stupide Matière).

The song brings out this material focus especially through its highlighting of two words: “baisé” and “l’ivresse.” “Baisé,” delicately translated by Aggeler as “kissed,” reveals its double entendre through its harsh, mechanistic repetition. “L’ivresse” (drunkenness) receives a similar treatment. The bass joins this mechanistic groove, now much more agitated, and this groove is then mashed up with the opening space music, leaving its meaning open.

Every listener will take something different from the song, depending as they may identify in different ways at different moments with the three voices or the bass. It is a remarkable statement, and I look forward to hearing more songs from Charles.

Welcoming new faculty

The Music Theory and Musicology areas recently welcomed two new faculty members: Dr. Daniel J. Thompson and Dr. Sarah Suhadolnik. Among their wide-ranging teaching and research initiatives, both share interests in jazz history and contemporary performance. We are thrilled to have them join the UI community, and we look forward to sharing updates on their work in the future.

Sarah Suhadolnik joins the faculty at the University of Iowa as a scholar and teacher of American music, with special interests in jazz and popular music. She has presented papers at national and international conferences, including the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the American Studies Association, and the International Musicological Society. Her publications include articles in The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd Edition, and a study of the contemporary singer-songwriter Adele featured in the 2016 Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter. She has also served as a member of the editorial staff for both the Music of the United States of America series and the University of Michigan Gershwin Initiative, and acted as the managing editorial assistant for the Journal of Historical Research in Music Education (2015-2017). Suhadolnik’s teaching has been recognized by the University of Michigan (Glenn McGeoch Memorial Scholarship in Musicology), and includes extensive experience as a teaching consultant.

Suhadolnik received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where her dissertation, Navigating Jazz: Music, Place, and New Orleans, was supported in part by the Lillian A. Ives Graduate Student Fellowship at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, and is currently under contract with University of Michigan Press. Before joining the faculty at the University of Iowa in 2011, she taught at Michigan and Western Michigan University.

Daniel J. Thompson joined the University of Iowa School of Music in August of 2017 as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Theory. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in music theory and analysis—including courses in the undergraduate musicianship sequence, tonal analysis (Caplin), atonal theory, and fundamentals of music for non-majors.

Daniel received the Ph.D. in Music Theory and Composition from Florida State University in 2017 with a dissertation that recontextualizes the semiotic theories associated with musical “topics” (inferred style references taken as symbols of cultural themes) within hard bop—a widely celebrated Afro-modernist movement in American jazz (c. 1954–65). As a graduate assistant in both music theory and jazz studies at Florida State, Daniel taught undergraduate courses in music theory, aural skills, and jazz piano. He studied composition with Ladislav Kubík, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, and Robert Mueller; digital music and computation with Mark Wingate and Clifton Callender; and jazz piano with Bill Peterson.

As a scholar, Daniel’s eclectic theoretical interests largely intersect with semiotics (sign systems), psychoanalytic theory, and cultural criticism. He has given talks at the national meetings of the Society for Music Theory (SMT) and the Semiotic Society of America (SSA), as well as several regional and graduate-student music conferences. His review of William Echard’s Psychedelic Popular Music: A History through Musical Topic Theory is forthcoming in Popular Music, and an article related to his dissertation is currently in peer review.

As a composer, Daniel’s work has been performed at the Dimenna Center for Classical Music and Spectrum (both in New York City) and at the Secret Theatre in Long Island City, NY. His miniature summoning a skeleton specter was performed by clarinetist Thomas Piercy and pianist Yusuke Satoh in the “Tokyo to New York” concert series (Tokyo, 2014); remnants—a work for clarinet and live electronics—premiered in 2017 at Florida State University’s Eighteenth Biennial Festival of New Music. Daniel’s ongoing creative work largely consists of electronic music (typically a blend of real-time synthesis, live processing, and sample manipulation in SuperCollider or Max/MSP)—taking the form of sound installations, works with live choreography, improvisations, and fixed media. Outside of the digital realm, Daniel also remains active as a jazz-piano soloist.

 

Stanford Humanities Center Fellow Q&A: Music theory scholar Jennifer Iverson

Prof. Jennifer Iverson, who has been spending 2015-2016 as a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, has been interviewed about her research.  Read the interview here: http://shc.stanford.edu/news/research/stanford-humanities-center-fellow-qa-music-theory-scholar-jennifer-iverson

 

Recent Faculty Activities

Iowa faculty have recently been active in publishing scholarship, presenting papers, and developing new pedagogies. Christine Getz’s “Canonizing San Carlo: Sermonizing, the Sounding Word, and Image Construction in the Polyphony for San Carlo,” was published in the 2015 edition of Early Music History. This essay examines the role of the hymns, the sacred polyphony by Vincenzo Pellegrini and Andrea Cima, and the spiritual madrigals of Giovanni Battista Porta in promoting the officially sanctioned image of Carlo Borromeo after his elevation to the status of ‘beato’ and following his canonisation.

Trevor Harvey’s chapter, “Avatar Rockstars: Constructing Musical Personae in Virtual Worlds,” about music in Second Life, was just published in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality, edited by Sheila Whiteley and Shara Rambarran.

 

The CD, Brazilian Dreams: Music of Michael Eckert, was released in the fall of 2015 on MSR Classics MS1549. It includes Three Chôros, Three Pieces in Brazilian Style, Three for the Road, Three Scenes (Amanda McCandless, clarinet; Polina Khatsko, piano); Three Tangos, and Three Pieces for Two Pianos (The Unison Duo). Michael Eckert has also published a review of Ben Earle, Luigi Dallapiccola and Musical Modernism in Fascist Italy in The Journal of Musicological Research 34 (2015): 352-354.

Jennifer Iverson gave a talk in January 2016 at CCRMA, The Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University, one of the foremost computer-music centers in the world. The talk, “Invisible Collaboration: The Dawn of Electronic Music at the WDR” is available on YouTube.

In January, Marian Wilson Kimber presented a paper, “Women’s Musical Readings and the Canon: Genre, Performance, and the ‘Work’ Concept,” at an interdisciplinary conference, Women and the Canon, at Christ Church, Oxford University. The paper explored the historical position of a rare women’s genre, the musical reading, for spoken word and piano.

Matthew Arndt was awarded an Innovations in Teaching with Technology Award from Iowa’s College and Liberal Arts and Sciences for his project, “New Tools for Musicianship and Theory Pedagogy,” which enhances undergraduate theory pedagogy through a program called SmartMusic and an app, Anki.

 

 

Fall 2015 Lecture Circuit

Here’s a run-down of the papers that musicology and theory faculty and students are delivering this fall:

Marian Wilson Kimber presented a paper, “Li’l Brown Baby: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Dialect Verse, and Musically-Accompanied Recitation by Women” at the fall meeting of the Midwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society in Chicago.  The paper explored the use of music in the spoken-word performances of the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, and role that the widespread popularity of his poetry with female elocutionists and composers played in its reception. Historical Dunbar and Douglass poster courtesy Ohio History Center, Columbus Ohio.

Cage ca. 1950

Jennifer Iverson presented a paper, “Preparing Electronic Music” at the national meeting of the Society for Music Theory in St. Louis. The paper explored the reception of John Cage‘s prepared piano music in West Germany between 1952-54. Before the aleatory debates of the later 1950s, Cage’s prepared piano had a profound effect on both the sound and the temporal structure of early WDR electronic music.

 

Kelsey McGinnis

Kelsey McGinnis, a PhD student in musicology, gave a presentation titled “Intersections: Music, Human Rights, and Cultural Diplomacy in an Iowa POW Camp” at the International Symposium on Cultural Diplomacy in the United Nations. The conference was hosted at the United Nations headquarters and other UN consulates in New York, bringing together academic and political professionals. Kelsey presented her work on the musical activities of German POWs in Iowa during WWII as a case study in the history of U.S. cultural diplomacy.

Iverson is Stanford External Faculty Fellow

Hoover Tower at Stanford University

Jennifer Iverson, assistant professor of music theory, has won an External Faculty Fellowship from the Stanford Humanities Center. Iverson is one of ten external fellows selected from a pool of over four hundred applicants, making this one of the most competitive and prestigious residential fellowships in the nation. In a happy coincidence, a second University of Iowa professor, Blaine Greteman, is also in the 2015-16 Stanford cohort. A College of Liberal Arts and Sciences article about that is here.

Iverson will spend the year in Palo Alto working on her book project, Electronic Inspirations: The WDR Studio and Musical Thought at Mid-Century. Her research elucidates the impact of the WDR (West German Radio) studio and its music on the post-war European musical avant-garde in the critical decades of the 1950s and 1960s. The WDR in Cologne quickly became a new music mecca due to robust government funding for its electronic studio and related concert series and broadcasts. It is a crucial but so far overlooked institution for the pan-European post-war musical avant-garde. The rise of electronic music at mid-century is deeply engaged with broader cultural questions about the role of technology in institutions, art, and life. Electronic Inspirations shows how the electronic music made at the WDR drove the development of mid-century classical music, and shaped the proliferation of technology in post-war culture more broadly.

Stanford Humanities Center

The fellowship represents an incredible and rare opportunity for focused research and writing within a community of top-notch humanities scholars. This broader humanities context is quite desirable, as Iverson and Matthew Arndt found during their tenure as fellows-in-residence at the Obermann Center at the University of Iowa. As Iverson explains, “More and more, I find that feedback on my writing and my ideas from those trained in the humanities, but not necessarily in music theory or musicology, is extremely insightful and valuable.” Iverson will return to teaching at the University of Iowa in Fall 2016.

Faculty Summer Research 2015

Musicology, Music Theory, and Composition faculty members have been hard at work during the summer months developing their scholarly and creative projects.

Ananuri

Matthew Arndt (Music Theory) went on a trip to Georgia in order to learn more about Georgian music. In particular, Dr. Arndt took a Cultural Heritage Tour through western Georgia led by John Graham, an expert on Georgian music. He heard lots of folk and sacred music, and obtained various chant books and recordings. The picture at the left shows Ananuri, a castle on the Aragvi River in Georgia.

Michael Eckert (Composition and Theory) is celebrating the release of his new CD Brazilian Dreams: Music of Michael Eckert. The album features Dr. Eckert’s original compositions in the chôro style with performers the Unison Piano Duo, Amanda McCandless (clarinet), and Polina Khatsko (piano). A genre of Brazilian popular music that developed in Rio de Janeiro in the late nineteenth century, chôro has its roots in a performance style for social dances such as the polka, mazurka, waltz, and maxixe, combining harmonic and formal features of European music with Afro-Brazilian rhythms. The album is available on the MSR Classics website and on Amazon now (MS 1549), with the retail release scheduled for October 2015.

Lawrence Fritts (Composition) is performing micro-surgery on up-close recordings of a male theatre student’s dramatic speaking voice for a new piece.  He is also supervising a $70,000 major upgrade to the University of Iowa’s Electronic Music Studios, which are celebrating their 50th anniversary this year.

Christine Getz (Musicology) spent significant time this summer doing archival research in Milan, Italy. There, she promoted her book chapter titled “Music in the 16th and 17th Centuries” in a history volume, A Companion to Late Medieval and Early Modern Milan: The Distinctive Features of an Italian State, edited by Andrea Gamerini and published by Brill, a publishing house known for its international focus. A formal, televised presentation of the book was held on June 8 at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, a historic library in Milan. A panel of well-known historians discussed the importance of the book and its content. The two chapters on music, one of which was penned by Getz, were among those discussed at length by the Italian intellectuals.

Amsterdam

Jennifer Iverson (Music Theory) spent five weeks abroad in April and May, visiting Cologne, Kuerten, Basel, Amsterdam, and The Hague. Dr. Iverson is researching a book about the WDR electronic music studio, and its impacts on the Darmstadt avant-garde in the 1950s-60s. This involves studying correspondence, sketches, and scores from archives such as the Stockhausen Foundation (Kuerten) and the Paul Sacher Foundation (Basel). A highlight of the trip was a lengthy formal interview with Gottfried Michael Koenig, a pioneer of electronic and computer music. Koenig served as the technician for Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge as well as many other of the early WDR works, and then expertly led the electronic and computer music innovations at the Institute of Sonology in the Netherlands for more than twenty years. The interview will be published in issue 276 of Tempo. The picture at the left shows the canals of Amsterdam.

British Library

Nathan Platte‘s (Musicology) summer activities included a trip to Los Angeles, where he visited UCLA’s Special Collections and the Margaret Herrick Library to conduct research on film composer Max Steiner’s early years in Hollywood. In July Dr. Platte participated in an international conference at the British Library that investigated the opportunities and challenges facing researchers working in audio-visual archives. The program included presentations, round-table discussions, and film screenings. An interview with film composer Ilan Eshkeri about his score for Still Alice (2014) included live performances by the piano quartet heard on the film’s soundtrack. Dr. Platte served on the conference’s program committee, shared a research paper about Max Steiner’s savvy navigation of the Hollywood studio system, and offered a position paper during the round-table discussion. The picture at the left shows Platte at the British Library.

Zack Stanton (Composition and Theory) has been working on a commission for the Midfest Band Festival at the University of Georgia. It is an honor band festival that takes place in December for the best middle school bands in that region. Lest you think that a middle school band piece is a piece of cake, Stanton reports, “You can’t imagine how difficult it is to write for middle schoolers.” Dr. Stanton also is hard at work on two future commissions from solo performers.

Marian Wilson Kimber (Musicology) received a second (!) publication subvention for her forthcoming book, Feminine Entertainments: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word (University of Illinois Press), from the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Wilson Kimber’s new article, “Ringing Bells in Accompanied Recitation and Musical Melodrama,” appears in The Hidden Soundtrack of the Long Nineteenth Century, special issue of Journal of Musicological Research 34, no. 3 (2015): 249–265. The article describes how, due to the prevalence of bells in poetry performed by late-nineteenth-century elocutionists, melodramatic compositions frequently included bell sounds to create poetic meanings surrounding the passage of time, religious rituals, and death.

Harvey, Iverson, and Platte Organize First Annual “Front Porch Music Festival”

Zack Stanton and Trevor Harvey playing in the open jam

Trevor Harvey (ethnomusicology), Jennifer Iverson (music theory), and Nathan Platte (musicology) and their families collaborated to host the first annual Front Porch Music Festival on Saturday June 20 2015. The festival encouraged residents of the Longfellow neighborhood in Iowa City to play music together on their front porches. An open jam (pictured above) ran concurrently through the length of the festival. “All are welcome to play, whether you consider yourself a ‘real musician’ or not,” said co-organizer Iverson. “We expect to see everyone from 2-year-olds with homemade percussion instruments to professional cellists.” Indeed, the diverse line-up of performers included young piano students, youth folk trio the Skipperlings, various small ensembles including banjo, guitar, dulcimer, cello, piano, flute, trombone, and voice, wind quintet LIROS, the inter-generational choir Family Folk Machine, and a rock band.

The organizers were inspired by Platte’s previous experience with a similar festival, the Water Hill Festival, in Ann Arbor, MI and Make Music Day on June 21, a world-wide celebration of music-making. As Harvey points out, “Making music together can and should be an important aspect of sharing a neighborhood, a community, a culture.” Though Harvey, Iverson, and Platte now practice ‘academic’ music professionally—-teaching about historical, structural, and cultural aspects—-they all trained as performers for a large portion of their lives. “It was fun to get back to performing and playing,” Platte said. Platte and other performers are featured in a local news video segment from KCRG Channel 9. The organizers plan to make the festival an annual celebration.

Wilson Kimber, Cook, and Others Honored by Society for American Music

elocution and the 19th century American woman

The Society for American Music has recently chosen musicologist Marian Wilson Kimber as the recipient of a publication subvention–an award that will defray the costs of publishing a book–for her monograph Feminine Entertainments: Women, Music and the Spoken Word (forthcoming from University of Illinois Press). The H. Earle Johnson Publication Subvention is “intended to support the costs of the publication of a significant monograph on an important topic in American Music.”  This is quite a significant award, as SAM awards only two subventions per year of $2500 each. Wilson Kimber’s book offers a detailed look at the under examined, gendered practice of elocution in the 19^th century. She shows that elocution was a touchstone for women’s participation in a host of creative literary, dramatic, musical and dance activities. Wilson Kimber uniquely reveals the 19^th-century American woman to have used the art of the spoken word not just for artistic and musical expression but also as a space to exert moral and cultural authority. At the same meeting, music theorist Robert Cook received an honorable mention for the Irving Lowens Memorial Article Award for his article “The Vocal Ecology of Crumb’s Crickets” in JSAM volume 7. An earlier post about that article is here.

Current and former University of Iowa faculty and students also made strong research presentations. At the conference’s opening session, School of Music Assistant Professor Nathan Platte presented new historical findings on the “Tara” theme from Gone With the Wind. Alumna Katheryn Lawson (MA, Musicology, 2013) hosted a discussion panel titled “Childhood and American Music.” Alumnus Michael Accinno (MA, Musicology, 2010) presented a paper on musical activity at the Perkins School for the Blind in the nineteenth century. At a special ceremony that featured a performance of his Piano Trio, UI alumnus Olly Wilson (Ph.D., Composition, 1964) received an Honorary Membership Award from the Society for his “inestimable contributions to American musical culture through his compositions, his teaching, and his championing of African-American music.” Further news about Iowa contributions at the 2015 SAM meeting are here.

Hearty congratulations to Professors Wilson Kimber, Cook, Platte, and other University of Iowa affiliates for such strong work in American music!

Mojo Risin’ at Iowa’s Obermann Center

Two members of the music theory faculty, Matthew Arndt and Jennifer Iverson have recently been honored as Fellow-in-Residence at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. This award gives them a space to work on their research and writing at the Obermann Center, the chance to share and discuss work with other Fellows, $1000 for research, and the opportunity to apply for funding for interdisciplinary projects. Dr. Iverson is working in the same space that Dr. Arndt worked in in the fall (see photo), because it has the best mojo. During his Fellowship, Dr. Arndt completed the manuscript for his book project, “With God!”: The Musical Thought of Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg. Dr. Iverson is working on three article projects, discussing the dawn of electronic music at the WDR studio in Cologne, John Cage‘s 1954 visit to West Germany, and the disabled body in electronic music.