Abstract for Agents and Actors: Networks in Music History, 3 June 2022
Knust, Martin
Creating a Composer’s Network: Andréas Hallén’s Contacts to Germany and their Relevance for Swedish Composers until WW II
Andréas Hallén (1846–1925) has never been in the focus of music research. Only very few musicological studies about him have been written. There are various reasons for this, among others his reputation as a Wagner epigone or even imitator. Indeed, his at times sophisticated and relentless manner of creating a composer’s network on the Continent may be considered to be more interesting than his actual music. The important role Hallén played in Swedish music life as an organizer and communicator of music has not been fully appreciated yet. He worked as a link between Sweden and Germany in many ways. Beside various first Swedish performances of chief German works, which he initiated and often also conducted, and his attempts to found symphonic societies across the country he almost desperately tried to succeed as a composer in Germany. He was inventive and versatile in pursuing this task. Although not very popular as a person in his home country, his German contacts became important for the next two generations of composers in Sweden. Among them were Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871–1927), who can be regarded to be his student in composition, and perhaps even members of the ‘Spillran’, a strong pro-German composer group which was more or less led by Kurt Atterberg (1887–1974). Until now, such a lasting mediator function of Hallén’s networking activities in Germany has not been mentioned or even been worth considering in music research. In my paper, I will present some documents and hypotheses why it might have been exactly this, how Hallén proceeded to create it and try to outline the members and – equally important – also the non-members of his network. Apart from these more specific German-Swedish questions, I will outline a general model for analyzing composer networking strategies if it comes to relations between countries considered as ‘center’ and such considered as ‘periphery’ as they still matter in contemporary music life.
Biography: Martin Knust (Dr. phil., M.A.) is associate professor in musicology and member of the
research center for Intermedial and multimodal studies at Linnæus University (LNUC IMS) in Växjö, Sweden. His research interests focus on opera and music theatre after 1800 (especially the historical performance practice of speech, song and gestures), north European music after 1800 (especially reception and cultural transfer processes between the North and continental Europe), 16th-century sacred music, the music of Angkor (especially its iconography), and music in audiovisual political journalism (especially its production and aesthetics).
Talasniemi, Johanna
Aulikki Rautawaara and the collaboration with the members of the Sibelius family
The Finnish soprano Aulikki Rautawaara (1906–1990) established herself as an interpreter of Sibelius’s songs. She started her international career in the 1930s in opera and recording. During and after the Second World War her career focused on concerts and recitals. She collaborated with many Finnish and Nordic composers who dedicated songs to her. Jean Sibelius dedicated an earlier written but unpublished song “Hymn to Thaïs” to Rautawaara in 1945 inspired by Rautawaara’s and Sibelius’s son-in-law Jussi Jalas’s visite to Ainola, Sibelius’s home. Some of Rautawaara’s most influential collaborators came from the Sibelius family. Armas Järnefelt, composer, conductor, opera director and Sibelius’s brother-in-law engaged Rautawaara in the Finnish opera in 1932 and dedicated a song to her. Conductor Jussi Jalas was Rautawaara’s pianist in many concerts and on tours in the 1940s and dedicated folk songs arrangements to Rautawaara. Rautawaara and Jalas performed recitals consisting solely of Sibelius’s songs in 1945 in Helsinki and in 1949 at the Edinburgh Festival. Rautawaara sang as a soloist in many of the orchestral concerts of both conductors in Finland and abroad. In my presentation I will discuss Rautawaara’s collaboration with these members of the Sibelius family and how this network affected her work. My question is what kind of relevance this co-operation had for her artistic activities and career.
Biography: Johanna Talasniemi is a doctoral candidate at the University of the Arts Helsinki and a lecturer at the Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. Her research interests include cultural historical singer research and the effects of the Second World War on the careers of singers. In her doctoral thesis, she studies soprano Aulikki Rautawaara as a performer of Sibelius’s songs. Talasniemi has published articles about Aulikki Rautawaara’s Sibelius repertoire and about her concert activity in
the war years 1939–1944.
Netto, Anisha
Networking and Becoming in Late Eighteenth-Century Opera: Italian operas in German translation at the Erdődy theatre, 1785-1789
Opera is a genre that lends itself well to critical analyses based on theories of networks; it is a collaborative creation between composer, librettist and a host of other agents, and a work that comes together in performance through interaction. Between these visible networks of conception
and performance of an opera, there exists a slightly less visible network of reception, circulation and appropriation – linguistic and/or musical – consisting of publishers, patrons, impresarios, singers and translators, among others. While studies in music have previously drawn upon theories of networks such as Latour’s Actor Network Theory (Piekut, 2014) and Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of assemblage and becoming and applied them to ‘philosophy or music theory and analysis’ and ethnographic studies (Pirkko Moisala et al, 2014), there are lacunae when it comes to applying the same to the process(es) behind the creation of an opera and its subsequent reception and circulation. This paper will focus on Italian operas in German translations in the period from 1785-1789 at the theatre of Count Erdődy in Pressburg (modern day Bratislava), which forms an interesting counterpart to the theatres in nearby Vienna. How important a role have networks of circulation (and the individual agents) played in determining subsequent reception history of operas from this period, such as Martín y Soler’s Una cosa rara and Salieri’s Axur, Re d’Ormus – both contemporary works of the more well-known Mozart-Da Ponte operas? Using this historical backdrop, this paper proposes using a methodological framework of Latourian Actor Network Theory, supplemented by Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of becoming, in order to reflect critically upon the concept of cultural transfer and operatic networks of circulation and reception.
Biography: Anisha Netto is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Music, University of Southampton, where she held a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities for Languages (2018-2021). Her doctoral research focuses on the circulation and reception of Italian operas in German translation in late eighteenth-century German-speaking lands and their subsequent impact on the Singspiel as practice as opposed to genre, within the broader framework of cultural transfer.
Van Berchum, Marnix
The polyphonic “Te Deum laudamus” in the 16th century: a multilayer network representation
Studying a specific musical repertory entails the engagement with a multitude of information entities and their relationships, for example the musical sources in which the repertory is transmitted, and the composers, scribes, printers etc. involved. In musicological literature this engagement is most often captured in a descriptive and analytic narrative. The information entities and relationship though, can also be conceived as data, adding the possibilities of quantitative methods to the musicological discourse. Especially the concepts and methodologies of network theory – which have been successfully applied in other disciplines like sociology and computer science, and in more recent years in various publications and research projects under the flag of Digital Humanities – could prove to be useful for historical musicology. This contribution introduces the research I am pursuing on sixteenth century polyphonic settings of the “Te Deum laudamus”. A multilayer network is constructed, in which the information entities relevant to this repertory are represented in different layers. I will show how the data are collected from primary and secondary source material, and how these are transformed into different layers (including a co-occurrence network layer of pieces in sources, and a social network layer). The layers can both be analysed on their own, as well as in relation to each other. Existing literature shows that most of the polyphonic settings of the “Te Deum” can be found in musical sources related to the German Reformation, and that the text and its liturgical function occur in the theological writings of Martin Luther among others. The interconnection between these different types of sources is apparent, but a multilayer network approach can offer further insights in the manifold relations surrounding this text and its musical settings. Furthermore, it shows us how the complexity of musical repertories in a defined historical period and space can be studied.
Biography: Marnix van Berchum studied Musicology at Utrecht University, and specialized in musical culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. He graduated with a thesis on the motets of Jachet Berchem (c.1505-1567). In his PhD research he applies the concepts and methods of network theory on the dissemination of music in the sixteenth century. He has a wide range of experience in projects
related to research data, Open Access and ‘digital musicology’. Marnix is Associate Director and contact person of the Computerized Mensural Music Editing Project. He is employed at the Huygens Institute (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), where he bridges the gap between research, data management and the activities of the Digital Infrastructure department.
Heli Reimann
The (new) awakening of Soviet jazz culture in 1980s
This presentation aims to discover how jazz as a cultural practice was moulded into the Soviet socio-cultural framework in 1960s. Relying on Polish sociologists Pjotr Sztompka (1991) according to whome social reality forms of totalities and individuals, the presentation claims that the growth of Soviet jazz culture took place as a dynamic interaction between Soviet state and the actions of cultural agents (fans and musicians involved with jazz). The presentation argues that the ‘jazz awakening’ in 1960s was part of Shestidesyatniki (Sixtiers) movement and that legalization of jazz took part within the frameworks of Soviet leisure activities and amateur culture. Besides, the growth of Soviet jazz was influenced by American international jazz invasion during the 1950s and 1960s the representative of which was Willis Conover and his Jazz Hour. The study relies on interviews with Soviet jazz musicians and fans as primary sources, and on historiographical and biographical works on Soviet jazz (Feyertag, Batashev, Vikharev) as secondary sources.
Biography: Heli Reimann’s research activities lie in the interstices between jazz studies, cultural studies, Soviet studies, Estonian cultural history, and popular music studies. Heli Reimann`s publishing record includes numerous of articles and monograph on Tallinn ’
Van Kan, Mischa
Transnational actor-networks and the American construction of Swedish jazz
Jazz has been coined as America’s classical music. Originating from and unique to the United States, the international embrace of jazz, with local musicians adopting American music, has been interpreted as a sign of its acceptance. But what happens when a “non-American” form of jazz, originating from outside of the US is imported back into the US? How was it positioned in relation to American jazz? Did American critics still regard it as jazz? And what does it tell us about the ideologies of jazz? Using actor-network theory, this paper traces and analyzes the network through
which Swedish jazz reached the US record market in the period 1947-1963. By analyzing the interactions between the various actors and actants in the network, the paper discusses how the network constructed Swedish jazz. This postwar era thereby witnessed a developing understanding
of jazz as not just an “American classical music”, but also a “global” art form. An unstable group formation of “Swedish jazz” in relation to “American jazz” reveals how the ideology of jazz was negotiated by record companies and record executives in an international context, producing a
specific ontology of Swedish jazz in a US-context. By following the dissemination and reception of
Swedish jazz in the United States, this paper shows the inner workings and dynamics of actor-
networks in jazz in a transnational perspective. It follows how these transnational networks were constructed and formed by human actors such as record executives and jazz critics, but also by non-human actants such as record covers and economic legislation. Thereby it shows the importance of networks for music history.
Biography: Mischa van Kan is a senior lecturer at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden. Van Kan’s research interests include jazz and popular music from Sweden and the Nordic countries as well as the interactions between music cultures, media, and technology. More specifically, his work analyzes
transnational contacts in local and transnational music scenes and investigates ideas of music and
the framework of nation-states with related issues like ethnicity, race and gender. His research on
music and media focuses on the ways in which music relates to sound reproduction media and their packaging, such as 78-rpm and vinyl records, and the ways in which these relations influence the meaning and the cultural position of the music.
Reese Willen, Anne; Olsson, Per-Henning and Kuritzén Löwengart, Mia (themed panel)
Musical net-working in Stockholm during the long 19th century (themed panel session)
Reese Willen, Anne: Actors and networks and the circulation and the implementation of music idealist views in Stockholm in the second half of the 19th century
The years around 1850 marks a culmination point of music aesthetical debate in Europe, which came to have a strong effect on the musical repertoire. Music aesthetical ideas about the concept of the work, of musical meaning and the aesthetical value of musical works helped form the ideas of a musical canon, especially in the German musical sphere that later spread all over Europe. A “music idealist” movement that had its center in Leipzig during the end of the first half of the century became greatly influential in spreading these ideas during the first half of the century. Several Swedish musicians studied in Leipzig at the end of this period and came back to work and hold key positions in Stockholm, greatly influenced of these ideas and ideals. In the 1850s the musical press in Stockholm flourished, creating a forum for disseminating these ideas and spurred a public criticism of the structures of the musical life and the concert repertoire in Stockholm at that time. In this paper, I will discuss how networks formed in relation to these ideas and how actors worked to circulate and implement the idealist musical views in the musical life of Stockholm. This connects to a larger research project dealing with canon and concert life in Stockholm in the second half of the long 19th century based on both qualitative and quantitative studies of musical criticism and musical repertoire etc. in Stockholm. I will also discuss what effect these ideological networks had on the musical repertoire and how these ideas translated to the concert programs. I will also consider actors and networks within the commercial field, and discuss how these connect to the established musical institutions and the musical repertoire in Stockholm forming a parallel sphere in the musical life.
Olsson, Per-Henning: The importance of networks to a female composer in Sweden in the second half of the 19th century
The importance of networks to a female composer in Sweden in the second half of the 19th century During the second half of the 19th century, the situation for female musicians and composers changed significantly. A class for female singers opened in 1854 at the Royal Swedish Academy of Music and then other classes opened for girls successively. Only two music professions had previously been available to women, singer and music teacher. Now, also other alternatives became possible, at least in theory. But in practice, female musicians and composers did not compete with male musicians and composers on equal terms, and access to networks was one reason to this. The purpose of this paper is to show how networks could have significant importance to a female composer in the second half of the 19th century. I will use the Swedish composer and pianist Valborg Aulin (1860–1928) as a case and discuss the role of networks when Aulin started her education and her career as a female musician and composer, in the dissemination of Aulin’s music, and how networks affected the possibility to have her music performed. Besides questions of gender, I will discuss the question of class. Two people that played a pivotal role in Valborg Aulin’s access to networks in the musical life of Stockholm was her father and one of her brothers. Her father Lars Axel Alfred Aulin was a well-thought-of teacher of languages and a very skilled amateur musician who died when Valborg was a child, but his contacts in the musical life still became important to Valborg. Her brother Tor Aulin was a renowned violinist, composer, and conductor. He had a very strong position within the musical life of Stockholm in the late 19th and early 20th century. For instance, he founded and played in the successful string quartet “Aulin-kvartetten” and founded the Stockholm Concert Society. In the paper, I will use Valborg Aulin’s String Quartet in F major as an example and analyse the musical score as well as the background, success, and performances of the quartet in connection to her networks.
Kuritzén Löwengart, Mia: Institution-Building. The Example of Stockholm’s Concert Hall
“The Importance of Cultural Philanthropy and Reliable donor Networks for Swedish Music Institution-Building.The Example of Stockholm’s Concert Hall.” This paper put emphasis on the significance of cultural philanthropy and of reliable donor networks for the realization of symphonic music institutions. In late 19th and early 20th century, members of the bourgeois elites in Northern Europe and in North America, promoted the creation of cultural institutions and universities, open to the public. At the time, Sweden’s governing structures were far weaker than today. Hence, cultural philanthropy also became an essential tool for the realization of symphonic music institutions in Gothenburg and in Stockholm, during the first decades of the 20th century. Previous research on cultural institution-building in Sweden has mainly focused on Gothenburg, in the light of the fact that liberals of the city’s leading circles launched a cultural drive, in the 1870s, intended to create a more dynamic cultural life, and that wealthy liberally minded donors made substantial contributions. Moreover, scholarship about Gothenburg has specifically pointed to the fact that, among the donors of these circles, Jewish donors were particularly prominent. Also, when promoting the realization of the city’s symphonic music institutions. Until recently, cultural philanthropy in the context of institution-building was associated with Gothenburg to such an extent that similar developments in Stockholm during these decades, have been neglected by researchers. The aim of this paper is to discuss the results of recent research on cultural philanthropy and donor networks in the context of the realization of Stockholm Concert Hall, in 1926. Among other things, it will show that not only class, but also the donors’ ethnicity was of importance, and that donors belonging to the same larger family and business network were of central importance to the creation of symphonic music nstitutions in both Stockholm and Gothenburg.
Biographies: Anne Reese Willén holds a PhD in Musicology from Uppsala University and is currently working there as a researcher on the research project “Canon and concert life: Formation Processes within the Musical Life of Stockholm 1848–1914” funded by the Swedish foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences. This project aim to provide new understanding for the formation processes within concert life and musical repertoires in Stockholm 1848 – 1914. The base of this project is a
comprehensive survey of concerts and musical repertoire in Stockholm structured in a database, as well as qualitative analyses of contemporary sources. Willén’s research interests focus on music history in Sweden in the 19th and early 20th century, music historiography, institutionalization and
professionalization within the musical life, musical canon and canon formation processes, and concert programming etc.
Per-Henning Olsson is a senior lecturer at the department of musicology at Uppsala University. Previous research mainly on Swedish symphonic music from the 20th century.
Dr. Mia Kuritzén Löwengart, PhD, Department of History, Uppsala University. Research interests:
Social, Cultural and Business history, and more specifically in Bourgeois culture and Jewish studies. In her doctoral dissertation (Uppsala University, 2017), Mia studied how preconditions were created for the establishment of a symphony orchestra and a concert hall in Stockholm. Importantly, she identified Jewish donor networks; familial and business networks, with Jews as well as with non-Jews, which generated donations to the establishment of the concert hall. Though, her dissertation is written in Swedish, important results are also described in the article:’Legitimization and Institutionalization of Symphonic Music in Stockholm, 1890 ‒ 1926. From a Matter of Bourgeois Concern to Social Urgency,” in J.I. Suarez Garcia och R. Sombrino Sanchez (red.) Symphonism in Nineteenth-Century Europe,’Specvlvm Mvsicae’ series Brepols, Turnhout (2019).
Tyrväinen, Helena
Soprano Aïno Ackté and the guardians of her golden cage: the Parisian opera machine as a network
I propose to analyse how a network of agents helped Finnish soprano Aïno Ackté (1876–1944) make a magnificent, well-paid opera career in Paris in 1897–1904 and what caused her to lose her privileged position surprisingly early. My contention is that all those involved in Ackté’s success had necessarily to think also of their own careers. Barytone Edmond Duvernoy (1844–19p7), Ackté’s teacher at the Paris Conservatoire, was a proponent of the Italian-French singing school. After a short-term engagement as a singer at the Opéra-Comique he dedicated himself entirely to the careers of his students. He paved Ackté’s way, first to the Conservatoire’s opera class and later to the orbit of Pedro Gailhard, director of the Paris Opéra in 1884–91 and 1893–1907. He continued to control her voice and direct her roles even during her operatic engagements. Gailhard (1848–1918) was effectively an entrepreneur subject to governmental regulation. Legal statutes binding together the Conservatoire and the Opéra obliged him to engage outstanding singer talents after their studies. He was expected not only to ensure the satisfaction of opera-goers but also to promote operas by French composers. Pierre-Barthelémy Gheusi (1865–1943) was part of Ackté’s professional community at the Opéra through his activities as a prolific librettist there. In this capacity he was able to profit from Ackté’s artistic investment and her popularity among Parisian audience. Furthermore, his responsibilities on prominent newspapers and magazines meant that he was able to put Ackté’s name and artistry on display. As Ackté’s career in Paris declined, that of Gheusi was in the ascent; in 1906–1907 he was co-director of the Opéra together with Gailhard. While all three greatly admired Ackté, they worked towards casting her in an artistic mold she could not accept. Duvernoy wanted her to excel in the Italian-French singing style. For Gailhard and Gheusi, on the other hand, it had more to do with the commercially exploitable virginal image of Ackté herself; moreover, they seem to have considered her ingratitude to France, as her engagement at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1904 was perceived, as unforgivable.
Biography: Helena Tyrväinen PhD studied musicology at Columbia University, EPHE, Paris (F. Lesure), and the U. of Helsinki (PhD directors A. Padilla and J. Samson, Towards the Kalevala Suite: Identity,
Eclecticism and French Trace in the Music of Uuno Klami, diss. in Finnish, Finnish Musicological Society & IAML Finland, 2013). A researcher in Musicology at the U. of Helsinki, she specialises in
transcultural questions, Finnish-French and Franco-Nordic music relations, the role of cultural capitals, and the music of Uuno Klami (1900–61), on which subjects she has published articles in
Finnish, French and English. She has received grants from many Finnish foundations, edited scientific anthologies, been a Board member of the Finnish Musicological Society, organised conferences in Helsinki, St. Petersburg and Paris, and presented papers in Australia, Europe, Japan, Northern Africa, Russia and the USA. In 1994–98 she participated in the Nordic research project ‘France in Nordic Music 1900–39’.
Sprick, Jan Philipp; Vidic, Roberta and Maggiolo, Tommaso (themed panel)
Between Intertextuality and Interrelationship: Vestiva i colli parodies (1566-1613)
The numerous parody compositions on Vestiva I colli (1566) represent an important chapter in the history of the Palestrina reception. Due to the popularity of the five-voice madrigal, there was an intensive reuse of the piece already during Palestrina’s lifetime and several decades after. Therefore, the widespread reception of the work and the intrinsic complexity of the parody phenomenon make it soon necessary to define a clear research framework for further investigations. The panel generally consider two topics of the conference in terms of intertextuality and interrelationship. In the first case, a discussion on the dichotomy of a close reading of interrelated musical scores and the understanding of networks such as chapels, schools and courts offer the opportunity for thinking about the work concept, theory building, finally localisation and historicization phenomena in music history. In the second case, a closer definition of diachronic and synchronic source studies necessarily led to reflect on a wider interdisciplinary approach in musical research. The three papers draw on interdisciplinary research in music analysis and music philology. Jan Philipp Sprick focuses on the practice of composing masses about Palestrina’s famous Madrigal Vestiva i colli within the Roman School, comparing Palestrina’s own parody with the polychoral rewriting of his successor at the Cappella Giulia and Sistina Ruggiero Giovanelli. Roberta Vidic examines some parodies of Palestrina’s madrigal Vestiva i colli from the Roman School and the Munich Court, drawing on the current debate on a stylistic differentiation of contrapunto alla mente. Tommaso Maggioli considers two magnificat of Orazio Colombano and Carlo Berti, in which the less-known use of parody in this genre is locally associated with techniques such as polychorality and alternatim practice. Overall, the question arises, how terms that are frequently used, such as ascendency, influence or tradition can be more closely described as the result of multidisciplinary analysis.
Sprick, Jan: Intertextuality and (Self)-Parody in Palestrina’s and Giovanelli’s Missae Vestiva i colli (1566/1599)
The paper focuses on the practice of composing masses about Palestrina’s famous Madrigal Vestiva i colli. The five-part madrigal first appeared in Il desiderio: secondo libro de madrigali a 5 voci de diversi… (Venice, Scotto 1566). In my analysis this model is systematically compared with the respective Kyrie of the parody masses. The first example is the also five-part Missa Vestiva i colli from the Missarum, Liber 9 by Palestrina (Venice, Scotto 1599). The second example is the eight-part Missa Vestiva i colli (1599 post) of his successor at the Cappella Giulia and Cappella Sistina Ruggiero Giovanelli. For the analysis of the latter, copies dating back to Fortunato Santini are also considered in the paper (D-MÜs SANT Hs 1194 and 1197; D-Bsa SA 450; D-B Mus.ms. 30163). On the basis of this repertoire, three questions will be discussed in the paper in greater detail: 1. According to which technical criteria are voices in the arrangements of Palestrina and Giovannelli altered or supplemented? 2. A comparison of their versions reveals a changed relationship between horizontally oriented vocal polyphony and homophonic movement. Is this phenomenon in Giovannelli’s Missa only due to the increase in voices and the separation of choirs (polychoral re-scoring), or is it also due to a general change in style? Against the background of the repertoire at hand, how can the principles of “adaptation” and “parody” be distinguished from each other, especially if Palestrina’s Missa has to be described as a self-parody? In Giovannelli’s Missa the reference to the adoption of individual Soggetti is reduced and otherwise clearly moves away from the original. What is striking is the frequent use of homophonic compositional techniques, which should be examined more closely, especially within the network of composers of the Roman School.
Vidic, Roberta: Common language or local dialects: diminished counterpoint in the Missa Vestiva i colli of G.M. Nanino (Rome, 1594) and the parodies at the Munich court (1580s)
Recent scholarship started to put a greater emphasis on stylistic differences in contrapunto alla mente. Against this background I will examine some parodies of Palestrina’s madrigal Vestiva i colli from the Roman School and the Munich Court. The Roman composer Giovanni Maria Nanino left not only a five-part Missa Vestiva i colli (1594), but also didactic writings on counterpoint that are known from a compilation of Roman and Neapolitan sources (MS I-Bc P.124). Together with his brother Giovanni Bernardino he taught several later masters of the Roman School. Another composer who spent a part of his life in Rome, maintaining close connections to this circle around Palestrina, is Orlando di Lasso. It is therefore no surprise that we later find a five-part parody magnificat at the Munich Court (MS D-Mbs Mus.ms. 23, 1582) of his barely known organist Gioseffo Ascanio and a five-part parody mass of his son Rudolph (Nuremberg 1590), both based on the madrigal Vestiva I colli. Three main research questions will be discussed: 1. Considering a closer reading of stylistic features against the study of personal networks, how can be nearly defined a concept of ‘school‘ in late 16th century? 2. Small values could be either regarded as a basic feature of madrigal style or could be even depreciated in sacred vocal music as undesirable madrigalismus. How can we examine the change from a madrigal to a sacred genre such as mass or madrigal of cross-genre diminution? 3. Since diminution was also a matter of fashion and taste, is it possible to distinguish between different ‘manners’ in the reception of Palestrina in the Roman chapels and at the Munich court? It is interesting to note at this point that Palestrina’s own parody mass differs in terms of rhythm much stronger from the madrigal than all these examples.
Maggiolo, Tommaso: ‘Local’ examples of a less-known parody technique: the Magnificat Tirsi morir volea of Orazio Colombano (Milan, 1583) and Vestiva i colli of Carlo Berti (Venice, 1593)
f we exclude Orlando di Lasso, parody magnificat remains still largely underexplored. In my paper
I will consider two magnificat of Orazio Colombano and Carlo Berti, in which the use of parody is
locally associated with further techniques. Through the analysis of the Magnificat quarti toni super
Tirsi morir volea of Orazio Colombano, I will highlight the use of parody together with polychoral
writing in North-eastern Italy, a geographical area that is mainly considered for the so-called ‘venetian style.’ The piece is based on a madrigal of Marenzio and contained in Li Dilettevoli Magnificat (Milan 1583), a magnificat cycle over the eight psalm tones. In my analysis of the Magnificat Vestiva I colli of Carlo Berti I will show, instead, how this composer combined the parody of Palestrina’s madrigal with the alternatim technique. The piece is added now at the end of the magnificat cycle (Venice 1593). Moreover, Berti maintained in Florence Palestrina’s five-voice original scoring, while the Franciscan Colombano often adopted a nine-voice polychoral writing. Departing either from the musical scores, or from different networks the following questions arise: 1. Is there any relationship between the previous North-European tradition (in particular Lasso) and the two Italian composers? 2. Did Marenzio and Palestrina have an effect on Colombano’s and Berti’s own compositional style by the use of their musical works? 3. How did Colombano and Berti ‘extract’ and use the musical material, and which role do the Gregorian psalm tones play in their compositional procedure? My analysis evidences a varied treatment of the profane models, from the simple quotation of the beginning of the madrigal, to the selection of a single ‘cell’ for creating new complex points of imitation, making the model almost unrecognizable.
Biographies: Jan Philipp Sprick is Professor for Music Theory at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater
Hamburg. He studied music theory, musicology, history and viola in Hamburg, Cambridge/Mass. and Berlin. He taught previously at Humboldt-University Berlin, Universität der Künste Berlin, and the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Rostock. In 2012 he was Visiting Assistant Professor at the Music Department of the University of Chicago. His main research interests are history of music theory of the nineteenth Century, musical ambivalence, and methodological aspects of music analysis. He served as editor of the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie and lectured on a wide range of topics nationally and internationally.
Roberta Vidic is lecturer for music theory and a PhD candidate at the Hochschule für Musik und
Theater Hamburg (HfMT). Her dissertation topic is Palestrina and the origin of harmonic theories
in early eighteenth-century Venice. Degrees in harp and music theory from Udine, Munich and Hamburg, and further studies in historical pedal harps and improvisation at the Schola Cantorum
Basiliensis. Research interests include the history of music theory from 16th–18th century, musical
form in fantasy genres and musical terminology. Regular participation in international conferences
and publications. Double winner of the Scientific Competition of the German Society for Music Theory, her doctoral research is supported by Fondazione di Venezia and Fondazione Cini in Venice, and the German Historical Institute in Rome.
Tommaso Maggiolo graduated in clarinet at the Agostino Steffani Conservatory in Castelfranco Veneto (Treviso) and in Musicology (BA, MA) at the Università di Pavia (Cremona). After cataloguing the Cisilino Archive of early music transcriptions and working as an archivist at Istituto per la Musica of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini (Venice), he now holds a position at the Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi of the same institution. He is in charge for the edition of Colombano’s opera omnia (Li dilettevoli Magnificat, 2014; Liber secundus sacrarum cantionum, 2016) for the Centro Studi Antoniani (Padua). His edition of Gregorio Zucchini (Motectorum et missarum liber primus, 2018) has recently appeared in the new Musica Benedectina series of the Istituto Italiano per la Storia della Musica.
Paoletti, Matteo
«Impresari, les marchands de tout ce que vous voulez». Transatlantic European networks in South America (1890-1930)
Describing his South American tours in the memoir ‘Sous les étoiles’, the French actor and director
Lugné Poe provided a vivid portrait of the most increasing theatrical market in the world. In the early twentieth century, Argentina and Brazil had become able to compete with European and North American theatrical capital cities in terms of wages, audience and evolving repertoire. The Southern transatlantic routes were firmly controlled by few Italian, Spanish and Portuguese impresarios, that created umbrella organizations that would control individual theatres, complete productions, entire performing companies, principal singers, and even conductors. Hence, the European impresarios in South America envisioned, and in many ways created, a holistic theatrical ecosystem in terms of performance and production. This holistic approach extended to the types of works they featured on stage. Operas in multiple languages (Italian, French, Spanish, and German), spoken dramas, and operettas constituted nodes in their symbiotic network of theatrical genres, that appears genuinely European in its performance practice. They became, as Lugné Poe stated, «The merchants of everything you want». Starting from Lugné Poe’s testimony, the paper analyses the activity of Walter Mocchi (1871-1955), theatrical impresario and absolute leader of the transatlantic trade. When Italy found itself in various theatrical crises, Mocchi created a transoceanic theatrical empire, using his business acumen to craft viable solutions. While his efforts were most visible in the sphere of opera, he played an extremely significant role in the promotion and circulation of more popular forms of musical theatre (e.g. operetta) and staged world premieres of works by Italian superstars in Argentina and Brazil (e.g. Pietro Mascagni’s ‘Isabeau’). Along with his associates (the Portuguese Faustino Da Rosa, the French Charles Séguin, the Brazilian Joao Cateysson and many other minor entrepreneurs) Mocchi took control of the most important venues in South America, thus creating a network that deeply influenced the circulation of companies and repertoire.
Biography: Matteo Paoletti is a Senior assistant professor at the University of Bologna, where he teaches History of Theatre. He is the PI of the UNA Europa project Migrantheatre, which focuses on the role of migration flows in the contemporary performing arts production. He took part to several
international research projects, the main one being Historia y patrimonio de la Argentina moderna
(Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Buenos Aires). He served as a Cultural attaché at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and for the Italian National Commission for UNESCO he oversaw the 2003 Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage. In 2020 he published the monograph «A Huge
Revolution of Theatrical Commerce»: Walter Mocchi and the Musical Theatre Business in South America (Cambridge University Press), focusing on the circulation of opera and drama between Europe and South America in the early Nineteenth-Century.
Ables, Mollie and Neumann, Joshua
Social Network Analysis in/of Musical Centers of Singing
Musicians’ connections to performance institutions vary based on location, chronology, economic models, and the ways these institutions are situated within their surrounding communities. Examining these institutions and their relationships to the musicians associated with them, this panel pays particular attention to the relationships of the musicians with each other in the context of the institutions as cultural gatekeepers. Situating these musical actors in network graphs affords visual representations of these matrices of connections.
The presenters are analyzing these connections in different locations and time periods, including seventeenth-century Venice, eighteenth-century German-speaking lands in Western Europe, and early-mid twentieth-century New York City. Each study, to some extent, examines operatic institutions as a cultural and economic influence in musical communities. They each derive data from different kinds of sources, prompting critical discussion of the capabilities and limitations of three different visualization platforms–Gephi, Neo4j, and Cytoscape. Running network analysis suggests a variety of ways that different performers are central or peripheral to these institutions and points towards a variety of reasons for these differences, highlighting the complexity of employer-employee relationships.
Ables, Mollie: Visualizing Venetian Musicians’ Networks
Following a series of cultural and economic shifts in the late seventeenth century, the average career path for a Venetian musician was dramatically different than in previous decades. More and different types of institutions were established and, as a result, musicians were less likely to hold a single salaried post. Many worked at multiple institutions simultaneously or in succession, which altered existing networks among musicians and the institutions that employed them. A wider variety of musical institutions and venues resulted in a wider variety of sources documenting musicians’ activity. For example, the public opera houses – first established in Venice in the 1630s – published the libretti from their productions, often including names of singers and composers. The Venetian tourism industry grew along with the number of institutions; tourist guides, travel diaries, and periodicals commenting on the artistic events of the city were published with greater frequency. The sources represent the different aspects of musicians’ lives and careers that could be documented. This presentation addresses how these sources interact with one another in the context of a musician’s career using a directed bimodal network graph created in Gephi. Using data derived from XML transcriptions of the documents in addition to assigned metadata, the graph demonstrates connections between musicians and the documents that name them. The goal of this research is not only to investigate relationships among musicians within and between institutions, but also to see how networks align between different kinds of documents.
Neumann, Joshua: Performers and Network Analysis in World Premieres at the Metropolitan Opera
Operatic world premieres, generally attract more discursive and analytical attention than other performances, with most focus on the composer, house manager or impresario, or the social, cultural, and political landscape comprising each event’s respective milieu. New York’s Metropolitan Opera, with its General Manager position closely modelled on 18th century impresarios, is no exception. The company’s first world premiere occurred in December 1910 (Giacomo Puccini’s La fanciulla del West), nearly thirty years after its founding. While 10% of the operas in the Met’s repertory first occurred on its stage, only 0.12% of the 29,000+ performances there have been world premieres. Such rarity raises important questions about this institution’s selection of performers to entrust bringing new works to its stage. Some of the 20th and early 21st centuries’ most recognizable singers, conductors, and directors participated in creating the more than thirty world premiere performances at the Metropolitan Opera. Existing examinations here prioritize how Enrico Caruso, Geraldine Farrar, Leontyne Price, Sherill Milnes, Plácido Domingo, Joyce DiDonato, Arturo Toscanini, Thomas Schippers, Franco Zeffirelli, David Belasco, and others contributed their substantial professional prestige to the premieres. Their lesser-known compatriots—Marie Tiffany, Louis D’Angelo, Albert Reiss, Minnie Egener, and others—in less visible roles are generally overlooked. This paper applies informatics and network theory methodologies to the unparalleled comprehensiveness and accessibility of the Met’s performance history to shed new light on these individuals and the complex matrix of their collaborations and professional experience. Visualising these data and analysing their inherent social network reveals two areas of institutional praxis—compositional commission and casting choices – that correlate with both accusations of ongoing struggles to confront sexism and of increasing programmatic conservatism.
Biographies: Mollie Ables is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Wabash College. She has presented her research at DH conferences at Duke University, the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium, the Newcastle University Humanities Research Institute, and the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C., and at meetings of the American Musicological Society. She recently received a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation to conduct further archival research in Venice. More information on her research is available at www.musiciansinvenice.com
Joshua Neumann is a digital musicologist at the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz. Additionally, he is Executive Editor for the Opera Journal, published by The National Opera Association (US) and Co-Director of the Vienna Summer Music Festival’s Musicology Colloquium. Current projects include development of the Joseph Haydn Werkverzeichnis Online, social network analysis of world premieres at the Metropolitan Opera, and performance and reception analysis of Dietrich Fischer’s long association with Schubert’s Die Winterreise.
Whealton, Virginia E.
At the Fulcrum of the Early Republic: Musical Life in Early Nineteenth-Century Norfolk, Virginia
Norfolk, Virginia, has long been treated as a backwater in studies of musical culture in the early United States. While the rival port cities of Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Charleston have been portrayed as vibrant musical centers, Norfolk has received only passing references in scholarship,
usually as an intermediate stop for touring musicians and teachers, not as a worthy destination in
its own right. Using the extensive music collections amassed by Norfolk’s merchant and professional families, contemporaneous periodical literature, tax records, and other primary sources from the early nineteenth century, I show how Norfolk served both as a node and a center of several musical networks. In so doing, I argue that the city exerted considerable agency in Virginian, mid-Atlantic, and transatlantic musical exchange during the first third of the nineteenth century. These overlapping networks shaped Norfolk’s unique musical identity, inflected by its large population of itinerant foreign residents, by its unrivaled influx of French immigrants from Saint-Domingue, and by sustained collaborations between Jewish and Christian residents. I argue that in becoming such a musical center, Norfolk set the course for the growing divides of race, urbanization, and economy that would direct Virginia and the United States more generally into the antebellum period. I assert that Norfolk’s musical institutions and domestic musical culture recast and reinforced music as a mechanism of racial and cultural difference and advanced a new paradigm of whiteness spearheaded by Virginia’s emerging urban mercantile and professional classes. Although Virginia’s rural Old Planter class succeeded in wresting political control of the state back from these urban elites, the Old Planter class lost their position as arbiters of Virginia’s musical taste. Norfolk’s erasure as a musical center speaks less to historical record and more to a desire to portray the Northern and the Southern United States as having distinctly different musical cultures, social structures, and values. Ultimately, Norfolk points to state, national, and international musical networks dependent on, and not divided by, reliance on enslaved labor.
Biography: Virginia E. Whealton is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at Texas Tech University. A scholar of nineteenth-century music, her research focuses on two areas: 1) Parisian music, specifically on Romantic musicians’ travel writings and travel-inspired compositions, and their role in shaping
musicians’ public image; and 2) musical life and collectorship in early nineteenth-century Norfolk,
Virginia, and that musical culture’s intersection with gender, Jewish identity, urbanization, and the
politics of the Early Republic. Her writing and archival work have been supported by a series of grants, most recently the Rabbi Harold D. Hahn Fellowship from the American Jewish Archives. Recent publications include an article in Nineteenth-Century Contexts (2019), a chapter in Symphonism in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Brepols, 2019), and an article on the Polish-Ukrainian
composer Albert (Wojciech) Sowiński in Studia Chopinowskie
Keynote lecture by Fauser, Annegret
Anchoring Musical Networks
Musical networks share with other networks their various forms of constitution. Yet musical networks also have unique characteristics because of the way in which music—especially Western music—is constructed as an artistic medium that can cross boundaries seemingly without translation and mediation. This is particularly valid for transnational musical networks and their intersections. In this contribution, I explore how transnational musical networks are anchored through individuals (such as Wanda Landowska and Nadia Boulanger), shared repertoires (early music or jazz), participation in expert communities (as musicologists), and various markers of identities (ethnic, national, gender). I discuss the entanglement of music and biography within the constitution of such networks, and address the often complex and contradictory intersections of networks and their consequences.
Biography: Annegret Fauser is Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on music of the 19th and 20th centuries, especially that of France and the United States. Among other books, articles, and essays, she is the author of Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World’s Fair (2005), Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II (2013), The Politics of Musical Identity (2015), and Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” (2017). In October 2020, Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma (co-edited with Michael A. Figueroa), was published in the Music and Social Justice series of University of Michigan Press. She was awarded the 2011 Edward J. Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association, and her publications received multiple awards from the American Musicological Society and ASCAP. From 2011 to 2013 served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society. She has held residential fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the National Humanities Center, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Marie Curie Fellowship. She is currently writing a book with the working title, In Quest of Beauty: Wanda Landowska’s Musical Life.