This Weekend: Red Vespa Performs Musical Readings by Women Composers

Professor Marian Wilson Kimber Pianist Natalie Landowski (Western Illinois University)

Sunday, October 24, 2021 – 7:30pm
Stark Opera Studio, Voxman Music Building University of Iowa School of Music

Livestream: https://music.uiowa.edu/about/live-stream-concert-schedule

The duo Red Vespa, consisting of musicology professor Marian Wilson Kimber and pianist Natalie Landowski of Western Illinois University will return to the concert stage this week to present a recital of musical readings by American women composers. Wilson Kimber explored the brief, comic spoken-word pieces in her 2017 book, The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word. Red Vespa has appeared in Boston, Kansas City, Chicago, Washington, DC, and at Ohio State University.

The video that will be made of their recital has been awarded the Sight and Sound Subvention from the Society for American Music.

Red Vespa will also premiere a new work created for them by Portland composer and University of Iowa alumna Lisa Neher, Upon a Broken World. 

You can read more about the new piece in Wilson Kimber’s essay on the Women’s Song Forum: https://www.womensongforum.org/2021/10/19/musical-readings-on-a-broken-world/.

Congratulations Graduates!

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!

Iowa Musicology Day on April 14

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

9:30-10:30 Session 1: New Perspectives on Medieval Chant (Chair: Beth Zamzow, Kirkwood Community College)

Melanie Batoff, Luther College, “Contemplating The Social Function of the Visitatio sepulchri from Salzburg Cathedral”

Alison Altstatt, University of Northern Iowa, “Goscelin’s Songbook?: on the Origin of the Carmina Cantabrigiensia”

 

10:30-11:30 Session 2: Musical Events and Sources in Iowa (Chair: John MacInnis, Dordt College)

C. A. Norling, University of Iowa, “‘No Beautiful Whole:’ An Eighteenth-Century Don Giovanni Score in the Nineteenth-Century Operatic Cultures of Print”

Megan Small, University of Iowa, “On the Sunset Trail: The West in Iowa”

11:30- 1:00 Box Lunch (see below)

1:00-2:00 Session 3: Music and Mobilization (Chair: Jama Stilwell, Cornell College)

Elizabeth Dickhut, University of Northern Iowa, “‘Come Get My Mattress. I’ll Keep My Soul’: Music Mobilization and SNCC Through the Freedom Rides and the Albany Movement”

Marian Wilson Kimber, University of Iowa, “‘It’s up to the women’: Women’s Peace Songs for Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1930s”

2:15-3:15 Session 4: Music for Film (Chair: Eric Saylor, Drake University)

Lisa Pollack Mumme, University of Iowa, “‘I Am the One Who Runs from Both the Living and the Dead’: Action as Music in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)”

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

Location: The new Voxman Music Building is located on the corner of Clinton and Burlington Streets. Paper sessions will be held in Room 2, the Choral Room, on the bottom floor across from the stairs. If you take the elevator down, the door to the room will be on your left.

Lunch: Box lunches will be available courtesy of the University of Iowa Musicology Society in the lower level commons.

Parking: There are two paid parking garages in close proximity to the Voxman Music Building.

1) Directly across Burlington St. at the corner of Burlington and S. Clinton Streets, attached to the Old Capital Mall. Entrances to the ramp are located on both S. Capitol St. and S. Clinton St.

2) One block over on the corner of E. Court and S. Dubuque. Take your ticket and pay in the machines in the stairwells before leaving.

Iowa City: A helpful site for the downtown Iowa City area is: http://www.downtowniowacity.com/. Those who might wish to stay nearby in Iowa City overnight can try the Iowa House in the Iowa Memorial Union , a ten–minute walk from the Music Building, or the Hilton Garden Inn directly across the street.

Opera: The School of Music will be presenting Mozart’s Così fan tutte at the Coralville Center for the Performing Arts, April 13 and 14 at 7:30 pm, and April 15 at 2 pm.

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Anne Leonard to Speak on Romantic Iconography

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.

Musicology takes road trip to SAM

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! 

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.

 

Wilson Kimber in Washington Post

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.

On the Road: Spring Conferences

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]

 

Cody Norling wins opera paper award

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.

New Research on “Tara” from Gone With the Wind

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