Abstracts for Agents and Actors: Networks in Music History, 2 June 2022

Published 11.4.2022 | Updated 25.5.2022

Abrams-Husso, Lucy

The Institutionalization of ‘Uptown’: Contemporary music practice in New York City Orchestras1 960-1975

The aim of this paper is to examine how contemporary music composition aesthetics and practices came to be defined and institutionalized as ‘uptown’ [‘midtown’] and ‘downtown’ in New York City through an analysis of orchestral programming. The geographic distinction of styles represents a pattern of separation of American contemporary music practices that started in New York City, and spread across the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. I propose that the division of contemporary music practices in NYC and the ultimate institutionalization of ‘uptown’ is inextricably linked to changing orchestral practices in New York City in the late 1960s through the 1970s.

Biography: Clarinetist Lucy Abrams-Husso is a Chicago native based in Helsinki since 2013. She received Bachelors degrees in clarinet performance and anthropology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Master of Music degrees from the Eastman School of Music and the Sibelius Academy of the Uniarts Helsinki. Formerly Co-principal and e-flat clarinet of the Oulu Symphony, Lucy is an active freelance musician in southern Finland. She has appeared as soloist with the Sibelius Academy Symphony Orchestra, Mikkeli String Orchestra and Haapavesi Chamber Orchestra. Since 2016, she has been a doctoral candidate at the Sibelius Academy. Her research focuses on Finnish and American contemporary music, and has been supported by grants from the Wihuri, Aaltonen and Finnish Cultural Foundations.

Zechner, Ingeborg

Forced into Hollywood? The Migration of Film musicians in the early 1930s and their Networks

In 1933 the Nazi’s rise to power in Germany led to a migration of Jewish musicians and composers to the United States via the “waiting room” France. There, exiled from their former European musical lives by being “driven into Paradise” and forced to quit their careers, most of émigrés were compelled to compose for Hollywood’s movie industry to make a living. Today this account serves as an established ground for musicological research on the migration of film “musicians”. In the process of migration “musicians” – despite the obvious professional differences between composers, conductors, instrumentalists, singers, etc. – are often perceived as a relatively homogenous group. This has led to simplified conclusions on the matter. Though, it is generally acknowledged that the professional networks of the music industry were of crucial importance in facilitating the process of migration. This paper tries to reevaluate the common notion of Jewish professionals in the film music industry by looking at the careers of Friedrich Hollaender, Franz Waxman and Miklós Rózsa before their professional networks as well as the political, economic and technological context in the early 1930s. It will be shown that the international networks of the film industry played an immensely important role for the careers of these composers. Nevertheless, in the research on film “musicians” these networks have hardly been considered. Overlooking the existing film industry networks have resulted in the perception that the act of migration equaled a break in the professional careers of film composers. Thus, it will be argued that the emigration of film composers has to be differentiated from to those with a sole background in concert music. In addition, the simplified narrative of a career break caused by the migration also reveals implicit aesthetic prejudices in the research on composers of film music.

Biography: Ingeborg Zechner is a musicologist at the University of Graz (Austria). Her research focuses on music history, musical theatre, and opera from the eighteenth to the twentieth century,
sociocultural and reception history of music, film music and (inter)media, musical migration/mobility as well as digital musicology. At the University of Graz, she is currently Principal Investigator of a research project on Hollywood composer Franz Waxman, financed by the Austrian Science Fund. After receiving her doctorate in historical musicology from the University of Graz in 2014, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Gluck research center at the University of Salzburg. Ingeborg Zechner received the John F. Ward Fellowship of Houghton Library (2013/14) and was awarded a Fulbright Visiting Scholar Grant at Syracuse University (2018/19).

Stanevičiūtė, Rūta

Lithuanian and Polish Musical Networking during the Cold War

Lately the concept of network interaction has spread in the studies of social and cultural processes in the USSR. Such an approach deepened the understanding of the structure of the Soviet society through the dissociation from the concept of hierarchised society, formed by the totalitarianism theories of the Cold War period. The change in the approach simultaneously gave special prominence to the phenomenon of transnational informal networking by opening its impact on diverse social and cultural practices. Poland and Lithuania at the end of the Cold War serve as a case study for the theorization of musical networking. In this paper, a little-studied field of two neighbouring countries’ cultures has been chosen: oppositional musical networking, that in addition resulted in politically and socially engaged collaboration between Polish and Lithuanian musicians since late 1970s. Basing on the concept of a transformative contact (Padraic Kenney 2004), the author reflects on the factors which predetermined the intercommunication of informal communities in mentioned countries in the years of ideological and political constraints and the ways in which such relationships contributed to the cultural and political transformation of societies. Through the interactions of the milieus of the Polish and Lithuanian contemporary music, the participation of the norms and representations of one culture in the field of the other culture is discussed. The author shows that the paradoxical constraints on the informal relations between Lithuanian and Polish musicians were strongly affected by the political relations between the USSR and the Polish People’s Republic, especially in the wake of the intensification of political resistance to the imposed Communist regime in Poland. In that particular environment, a new view on Lithuanian culture was shaping in Poland, which allowed Polish critics through music to define a new Lithuanian cultural identity, different from the previous politicised stereotypes, while the Polish music and musicology contributed to the renewal of the music modernisation discourse in Lithuania.

Biography: Rūta Stanevičiūtė is a professor at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre. Her field of interest are modernism and nationalism in 20–21-c. music, philosophical and cultural issues in the analysis of contemporary music, music and politics, and the studies of music reception. She is the author of the book on the ISCM and Lithuanian music (2015), co-author of the books on music and the Cold War (2018), microtonal music in Central and Eastern Europe (2020), and (trans)avant-garde in Lithuanian music (2021), also edited and co-edited 12 collections of articles on twentieth-and twenty-first-century musical culture, and music philosophy. In 2005–2010, she served as a chair of the Musicological section at the Lithuanian Composers’ Union. In 2003–2008, she was a chair of the ISCM Lithuanian section. Since 2020, she is a chief editor of the international scholarly journal Lithuanian Musicology. In 2020, she was awarded the National Prize of Lithuania.

Costa, Jacopo

The History of the Mongezi Feza Collective, or how to Keep Underground Music Alive in Italy through Networking (and Arguing)

Active in Italy from 1987 until 1997, the Mongezi Feza collective (of which Robert Wyatt was one of the honorary presidents) dealt with concert organization, radio broadcasting, as well as in the publishing branch with a magazine called Musiche. The heir to networking experiences such as Rock In Opposition or the Italian cooperative l’Orchestra, it perpetuated their artistic activities and ideological orientations, was the main Italian referent of a widespread “underground” music scene
between the two decades, and represented – at least chronologically – the link between the organizations already mentioned and the Controcircuito Musicale Indipendente (Circ.a), a more structured and comprehensive underground network. Mongezi Feza stood as an important reference point for many musical outsiders on the Italian territory, consolidating or creating links between numerous “heterodox” artists, an audience of curious listeners (both immune from the marketing schemes of the record industry and from most underground trends) and several daring music programmers. My speech, supported by an ad hoc interview with the founders of Mongezi Feza, will describe first of all the way in which the collective was created, how it operated, and the evolution of the Italian underground music network in the years in which it was active. This historical account will be the basis of a reflection on the cultural characteristics of the aforementioned network: while privileging underground and heterodox artistic expressions, the different actors of this network did not identify with any specific musical scene: instead, they committed to any music that would challenge tastes and ideas, without indulging in snobbery or superficial eclecticism. Finally, and with particular reference to the magazine Musiche, I will address the “polemical edge” of the collective through the criticisms it made about different aspects of underground music management (especially its promotion and media coverage): in retrospect, we can affirm that those criticisms proved to be far-sighted in exposing several « weaknesses » of the underground music networks.

Biography: Costa is a musician and doctor in musicology at the University of Strasbourg. The main subject of Jacopo`s research is experimental rock music, which he studies from the standpoint of music history, music analysis, sociology and economics. Since 2013 he has been teaching at the popular music department of the University of Strasbourg. He is a member of CREAA laboratory (Centre de Recherche et d’Expérimentation sur l’Acte Artistique). He is the founder of the art rock band Loomings and a member of the Italian avant-rock band Yugen.

O`Hanlon, Triona

Thomas Moore’s Network: Agents in popular song in nineteenth-century Dublin

Through the publication and popularization of two European song series (Irish Melodies, National Airs), Irish poet song-writer Thomas Moore cultivated an extensive and distinct cultural network, one which may be categorized according to place, community or agency. Moore was a global figure, and while London was a primary location in terms of developing his career, he spent periods of time in Europe and America, thus firmly establishing his role within an extensive community of creatives, patrons and socialites. Consequently, Moore, and his works, may be situated at the intersection of several temporal and spatial networks in music history. This paper will examine the social and cultural networks Thomas Moore cultivated in nineteenth-century Dublin, thus extending our knowledge of the publishers and musicians who contributed to the dissemination and reception of his Irish Melodies song series in original settings, subsequent editions and arrangements. The significance of Dublin within the wider context of Moore’s career will be considered, while aspects of the city’s wider cultural and political scene during that period will also be discussed. Moore’s first composer-collaborator on the Irish Melodies was John Stevenson, a Dublin-based musician who made a notable contribution to musical life in that city. Moore’s primary Dublin publisher for the Irish Melodies was William Power, who in addition to Henry Bussell, brothers Francis, William and Joseph Robinson, and James Duffy, firmly established Dublin as a centre for the publication and dissemination of Moore’s musical works. These individuals represent the shared networks established between musicians and publishers in nineteenth-century Dublin. This paper will uncover how Moore and his music intersected with cultural life, it will identify agents in popular song in nineteenth-century Dublin, while providing an overview of Moore, his networks, and his world.

Biography: Dr Tríona O’Hanlon is a contributing author to The Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (UCD Press, 2013) and Music and the Benefit Performance in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2020).
She is co-editor, with Sarah McCleave, of The Reputations of Thomas Moore: Poetry, Music, and Politics (Routledge, 2020). Tríona has been awarded several research fellowships including a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual European Fellowship (QUB 2015–2017) to undertake research on Project ERIN: Europe’s Reception of the Irish Melodies and National Airs; Thomas Moore in Europe. Her doctoral thesis ‘Music for Mercer’s: The Mercer’s Hospital Music Collection and Charity Music in Eighteenth-Century Dublin’ (DIT, 2012) was the first funded major research project to be published in collaboration with RISM Ireland. Her research interests focus on the historiography of music in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Dublin – with a particular emphasis on source studies, song culture, and Handelian scholarship.

Klein, Axel

Swan Hennessy as Victim and Beneficiary of French Musical Networks

The Irish-American composer Swan Hennessy (1866-1929) lived in Paris since about 1903 and died there in 1929, making the French metropolis the centre of his creative life. The fact that his music is so thoroughly forgotten – or still awaiting wider appreciation – is due to a number of factors, but networks play(ed) a decisive role. The only son of an Irish emigrant to Chicago, he neither sought the circles of Americans nor Irishmen and – women in Paris. Having studied at Stuttgart, Germany, he was no alumnus of either the Conservatoire or the Schola Cantorum, the two rival institutions for musical education in Paris. Also, he was no member of either the ‘Société Nationale de Musique’ or the ‘Société Musicale Indépendente’. Being financially independent, he was never forced to seek contact with the influential personalities of his time to make a name for himself. This lack of networks most certainly played to his disadvantage. The measure of acceptance and success that he did enjoy stems from his membership in a rather unlikely and equally neglected network: the ‘Association des Compositeurs Bretons’. In this paper I will provide details of how Hennessy’s career was shaped by the presence or the lack of networks and also how these factors actually shaped his musical language.

Biography: Axel Klein has studied at the universities of Hildesheim, Germany, and Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He received a PhD in musicology from Universität Hildesheim in 1995 and a Doctor of
Music honoris causa from the National University of Ireland in May 2022. An independent scholar based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, he is a Research Associate of the Research Foundation for Music in Ireland (RFMI) and was elected a Corresponding Member of the Society for Musicology in
Ireland (SMI) in 2015. He has published four monographs and two edited volumes on Irish art music in addition to numerous articles, book chapters, reviews and conference presentations. He was an editorial advisor for Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG, completed in 2008) and the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (2013). In 2019, his book ‘Bird of Time. The Music of Swan Hennessy’ (Mainz: Schott Music) was the first biography of this unique Irish-American composer.

Marshall, Chris

The Royal Albert Hall as Maori Meeting House; commissioning music for the 1982 Proms

This paper examines the works commissioned by the BBC for the 1982 Proms season, exploring the role of the commissioning process and the responses of the composers. Hugo Cole’s essay in the 1982 Proms Prospectus suggests a stylistic heterogeneity of the composers in question, comparing
them to ‘queens on the chessboard, [able] to move in any direction: backwards in time, to borrow and adapt the techniques of the medieval polyphonists, the neo-romantics, or the jazz improvisers
of the 1920s; outwards, to absorb influences from alien cultures’. Cole gathers these composers together, like Alfred Gell’s Maori meeting houses: each house is individual, but related to other houses either temporally, one house being based on a previous example; or geographically, each
house being based on nearby huts. The BBC’s Editor, New Music, suggested that the BBC commissioned on the basis of personal relationships, and the networks generating these recommendations revolved around the composers themselves, their publishers, and a group of interested BBC staff. The BBC worked with composers to commission on the basis of what they wanted to write. Any commissioning brief was an unwritten, informal agreement. Looking at these
networks through the lenses of Bourdieu’s Field of Cultural Production, Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory and Becker’s Integrated Professionals, I interrogate the apparent diversity of these works. I
also explore Foucault’s contention that almost any social group could be self-regulatory, applying
this to composers, who are acutely aware of the requirements of an unwritten commissioning strategy. This paper investigates the possibility that the BBC Proms, without any formal commissioning strategy or detailed commissioning briefs, nonetheless had particular requirements, widely understood by composers, and that it was the composers who imposed this strategy upon themselves. This approach will clarify to the music industry in general how the power of commissioning bodies is wielded, and how composers are able to acquiesce to their demands, while apparently pursuing an artistically independent course.

Biography: Chris Marshall is Head of Professional Development at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, helping students plan careers, untangling the business of music and preparing for successful portfolio careers. Since 1981 Chris worked at or for the BBC. He was a Producer at Radio 3 in London, working as Senior Producer on the Proms in the 1988 and 1989 seasons, before moving to
Pebble Mill in Birmingham. During this period he produced the CBSO’s broadcasts with Sir Simon
Rattle, including the opening concert from Symphony Hall; Radio 3’s coverage of the Aldeburgh and Cheltenham Festivals; and international chamber music series from Pebble Mill. He left the BBC in 1999 to become a Director of the independent radio production company Classic Arts, producing many dozens of editions of Private Passions as well as a succession of morning programmes: CD Masters, Classical Collection and Essential Classics. Chris was educated at Reading University, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Førisdal, Anders

Networked performance apparatuses. An appreciation of Herbert Heyde’s attempt at a new taxonomy of musical instruments.

In 1975, organologist Herbert Heyde published a small book where he presents a new classification system for musical instruments based on contemporary communcations theory. Describing instruments as networks of different elements, Heyde wished for his system to replace the Sachs/Hornbostel system. Although the book itself has received little attention, Heyde’s network model of musical instruments is highly relevant for the understanding of the use of instruments and technology in music by Heyde’s contemporaries like Lachenmann and Ferneyhough, and even more so in music composed in the last 20 years or so where performers increasingly find themselves performing with networked apparatuses. Presenting examples ranging from Stockhausen to Simon Løffler, this paper aims to shed light on the striking acuity of Heyde’s model for present-day concerns, as well as to show the relevance of this model to contemporary conceptions of technology, materiality, corporeality, performance practice and composition.

Biography: Anders Førisdal is a guitar player and researcher. His Ph.D. thesis analyses the relationship between musical structure and instrumental practice in guitar works by Richard Barrett, Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus K. Hübler. Førisdal is currently working on a post-doc project on institutionalisation processes at the Academy of Music, Oslo, and is part of the artistic research project Performing Precarity. As guitarist in the group asamisimasa or alone, he collaborates regularly with a number of today’s leading composers and has performed widely in an international context. He is editor of the journal Music and Practice and a board member of the Norwegian Musicological Society.

Keynote lecture by Benjamin Piekut

Networks, Materials, and Forms

Music studies in the 2010s was flooded with investigations into the agency of material things. Less common were accounts of how these actors were enrolled in larger networks and more durable institutions. In this talk, I survey some of these studies, as well as the sophisticated responses they have engendered in recent years. Drawing on new research in dance and improvisation, I conclude with a discussion of the importance of form, which has been overshadowed by our obsession with the material turn.

Biography: Benjamin Piekut studies music and performance after 1960. He is the author of Experimentalism Otherwise (2011) and Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem (2019), and the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies. He has also co-edited special issues of Contemporary Music Review on John Cage and Third Text on amateurism. He is a Professor in the Department of Music at Cornell University.  

Van Langen, Petra; Bolesławska-Lewandowska, Beata; Førisdal, Anders and Kelly, Barbara (themed panel)

The Network of European Musicological Societies

Since musicology developed into an academic discipline from the 19th century onwards, musicologists have united in networks. Initially in national societies, later also in international ones. Today the oldest musicological society is the Royal Society of Music History of the Netherlands (KVNM) founded in 1868. Since then new ones have emerged, with the Hellenic society as the youngest in 2012. Until recently these societies were mainly nationally oriented. Cooperation and collaboration between national musicological societies was not on the agenda. But the world has changed over the last one and a half century. Under influence of globalisation the world has become smaller and areas outside Europe have developed into important musicological centres, with consequences for the position of national societies, in general, and European Societies, in particular. In 2018 the 150th anniversary of the KVNM provided an opportunity to discuss the cooperation and collaboration of European musicological societies, which resulted in the foundation of Network of European Musicological Societies, NEMS, at the conference of Royal Musical Society (RMA) in Manchester last September. This Network is a loosely structured organisation, open to every musicological society that is interested in strengthening mutual bonds and exchanging experiences. As both a new agent and actor in the field of musicology the NEMS would like to contribute to this conference about Networks in Music History with a discussion about the challenges of today and the role this new network can play in addressing these challenges. The four papers will be short, so that there is much room for debate.

Bolesławska-Lewandowska, Beata: Musicology in Poland as part of national and the IMS networks

Polish musicology started to develop as a scientific discipline in 1911 at the University in Kraków, with Prof. Zdzisław Jachimecki, and in 1912 at the University in Lviv, with Prof. Adolf Chybiński (both pupils of Guido Adler). After Poland regained independence in 1918, there was already a group of devoted scholars, who aimed to work on the field and remained contacts with their colleagues from other European countries. In 1927, the group of Polish musicologists attended the Beethoven Congress in Vienna, where the Internationale Musikgeselshaft was reactivated. Soon afterwards, in February 1928, the Polish Musicological Society was launched, acting as Polish section of the IMG. However, all the ambitious initiatives undertaken by the Society in the 1930s were dramatically stopped by the outbreak of the WW2. After 1945, in the new political situation, Polish musicologists had to organise themselves once again. Following the directions from the USRR, in 1948 the Musicological Section was established as part of the Polish Composers’ Union, and the main actors to build this network were Prof. Zofia Lissa (musicologist) and Zygmunt Mycielski (composer). Soon after that, the musicologists attempted to renew contacts with scholars in the West, including the participation in the IMS network. The new chapter was opened only in the 1960s, with Prof. Lissa as one of the main actors. In 1964, the Polish Section of the IMS was established and since then the relationships between Polish musicologists and the IMS remained close, with Lissa, Prof. Jan Stęszewski and Prof. Zygmunt Szweykowski serving as members of the society’s Directorium. In my presentation I will briefly draw the history of the activities undertaken by Polish musicologists before and after WW2 in the context of creating the musicological networks both in the country and as part of the IMS.

Førisdal, Anders: Minor languages in an international context – a discussion of some central issues

In an increasingly international field, the question of academic writing in minor native languages is a pressing issue. Writing in a native language like Norwegian, one can hope to achieve more nuanced discussions than in a second language; however, writing in a major language like English one can hope to reach a broader audience. In Norway, where language has been a central issue in relation to national identity and political independence, this question is raised at regular intervals in terms echoing 19th century debates. This short paper will address some key questions regarding minor languages and the increasing anglification of the academic world, and pose the question: Can – or should – the NEMS play a role in facilitating the dissemination of musicological research in minor languages?

Kelly, Barbara: International music networks then and now: the Royal Musical Association and the Société française de musicologie

International music networks then and now: the Royal Musical Association and the Société française de musicologie This paper will look to the past to examine international musical networks, taking two established music(ologic)al societies and the interwar years as the focus. It will consider the evolving relationships to the IMS and how the societies negotiated national priorities with international initiatives, particularly in response to crisis. It will look at the benefits of schemes to affiliate international figures and whether these went beyond the purely symbolic. Acknowledging the role of key entrepreneurial figures from both societies, it will identify forgotten figures who worked less visibly behind the scenes. The paper will consider the internationalisation of national societies and the extent to which the international impinged on the societies’ events and festivals. In many respects our European societies today are outward facing; the recent RMA Annual Conference in Manchester provides an example, showing a society debating the nature of musical scholarship on a national and international level. The paper will stimulate discussion about the purpose and value of musicological networks in 2020 and will identify shared priorities for musicology in Europe today. How can the network respond to a changing profession, which appears to be more inclusive but is less secure in terms of employment? Can the network address key challenges that face scholars today?

Biographies: Dr. Petra van Langen is coordinator of the Network of European Musicological Societies. As an independent scholar she conducts research into music history, catholic music culture and the
history of scholarship, in particular musicology. She is also journal manager of the European Journal of Life Writing (ejlw.eu). She is currently preparing a biography about Albert Smijers (1888-1957), the first Dutch professor in musicology, and a biography about the Dutch queen Anna Paulowna (1795-1865).

Beata Bolesławska-Lewandowska, Ph.D., hab., is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences. She is the author of Panufnik (2001), Górecki. A Portrait in Memory (2013), Panufnik. Architect of Emotions (2014), The Life and Works of Andrzej Panufnik (1914–1991) (2015), Mycielski. Noblesse oblige (2018), The Symphony and Symphonic Thinking in Polish Music Since 1956 (2019) and editor of the correspondence between Zygmunt Mycielski and Andrzej Panufnik (Vol. 1, 2016; Vol. 2, 2018, Vol. 3, 2021). She has also published numerous articles and reviews on Polish contemporary music for musicological journals and music magazines both in Poland and abroad, as well as texts for websites, concert programmes and CD booklets. She is Chair of the Musicological Section and a member of the Main Board of the Polish Composers’ Union.

Anders Førisdal is a guitar player and researcher. His Ph.D. thesis analyses the relationship between musical structure and instrumental practice in guitar works by Richard Barrett, Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus K. Hübler. Førisdal is currently working on a post-doc project on institutionalisation processes at the Academy of Music, Oslo, and is part of the artistic research project Performing Precarity. As guitarist in the group asamisimasa or alone, he collaborates regularly with a number of today’s leading composers and has performed widely in an international context. He is editor of the journal Music and Practice and a board member of the Norwegian Musicological Society.

Barbara L. Kelly is Professor of Music and Director of Research at the Royal Northern College of Music. Her research is focused on French music and culture (1870-1939). She has published three monographs and four edited collections. She has recently co-authored a book on Durand’s wartime
‘Édition Classique’ with Deborah Mawer, Graham Sadler and Rachel Moore. She is completing a study on the singer Jane Bathori. She is President of the Royal Musical Association.

Andries, Annelies

Composers at the Institut de France: The Privilege of Institutional Networks

In 1795, the Institut de France was founded to foster and oversee intellectual activity in France. Three composers were invited to become members of this intellectual network: Gossec, Grétry, and Méhul. It was the first time composers were included in a learned society in France, setting them on an equal footing with philosophers, writers, and scientists. This paper argues that the composers’ inclusion in this institutionalized network created new forms of musical privilege. The society stood at the center of Paris’s musical life and its composers exercised considerable control over musical activities. They held influential positions in Paris’s major music institutions, including the Conservatoire and the Opéra. They evaluated various aspects of musical discourse and education: theoretical and practical treatises, instrument inventions, and the Conservatoire’s teaching methods. And, they served as judges for the Prix de Rome for composition, founded in 1802. Hence, the Institut consolidated eighteenth-century developments giving more prestige and autonomy to the composer and to music (Geoffroy-Schwinden, 2015). Yet simultaneously a new form of privilege was created (and contested) – a privilege for those with technical knowledge about music composition that would profoundly change nineteenth-century music criticism. The tension between these two effects is perceptible in the controversy concerning Napoleon’s decennial prize competition (1810). It featured two music prizes (for the best opera and opéra comique respectively), but only one for the best libretto. While the Institut’s composers judged the technical qualities of the works, they also felt compelled to take into account their popularity. And even then, their decisions were fought by several critics and newspaper readers – many of whom valued a work’s success with (amateur) audiences higher than compositional proficiency. The prestige of technical music literacy would rise throughout the nineteenth century becoming a basis for inclusion or exclusion from certain musical networks – a situation that continues until today, affecting music culture from university curricula to criticism.

Biography: Annelies Andries is Assistant Professor in Musicology at Utrecht University (Department of Media and Culture Studies). Her research focuses on music, theatre and politics in the long nineteenth century (1789-1914). Her work has been published in Cambridge Opera Journal and French Historical Studies, among others. She is preparing a book on elite identity formation in opera
during Napoleon I’s reign, 1799-1815. She collaborated with Dr Clare Siviter (University of Bristol)
on the cross-disciplinary project ‘Theatre on the Move in Times of Conflict, 1750-1850’ supported among others by a Leverhulme/BA small research grant, which resulted in a guest-edited volume for the Journal of War and Culture Studies. She is currently researching the connection between music and trauma in nineteenth-century musical representations of war. in Europe Annelies is an active singer; she also writes programme notes and gives introductions for various opera houses
and festivals.

Valiquet, Patrick

How Should a Network Listen? Pierre Schaeffer and European Satellite Policy

Surveying American techno-utopian writing in the mid 1980s, historian of science Howard Segel describes a widespread narrative trope in which the advancement of social justice is figured as dependent on the attainment of a ‘technological plateau’. Given conditions of material abundance
and a flexible, decentralized means of production, every individual on earth would enjoy a personalized balance between work and leisure. The scientific and moral progress of the industrial
revolution could safely level off into stasis. For the first two decades after World War II, social and
economic forecasters could still assert with relative certainty that the nation state provided the best means of achieving such an equilibrium in the long term. As the postwar boom came crashing to an end in the mid 1970s, however, it became clear to both activists and policy-makers that smaller and more flexible forms of organization were more practical. Expanding communication networks promised a radically new distribution of power in which individuals would no longer be susceptible to direct state intervention: the capacity take action at once more globally and more locally than ever before. As networks spread, this ethos of decentralization travelled with them. My paper dwells upon a moment when the norms for distributing cultural action across global networks were still up for negotiation. At stake is the political choice between seeing a network simply as a way of cohering, and deploying it as a form of capture. I follow author and broadcaster Pierre Schaeffer through the last decade of his career, a period that saw him shift from music research to advising on media policy for the European Commission and the French Haute conseil de l’audiovisuel. Schaeffer’s ideas about the prospect of decentralization by satellite and cable bring to the foreground previously neglected connections between his writing on music, his commitment to education, and his orientation toward the global mediascape of his time. While conventional wisdom portrays Schaeffer as an ardent futurist, his civil service record suggests otherwise: Schaeffer’s true hope was to slow innovation to a halt.

Biography: Patrick Valiquet is a writer, translator and musician studying the history and philosophy of musical thinking, with a focus on the conception, production and governance of ‘experimentalisms’ in
contemporary music. Between 2012 and 2021 he held research fellowships at the universities of Oxford, Edinburgh and Birmingham with funding from the British Academy, the Institute of Musical Research, the Fonds de Recherche du Québec, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Ongoing projects include a historical monograph reassessing Pierre Schaeffer’s listening and media research, several articles examining the epistemologies of radical university music teaching experiments in France and Britain in the 1970s, and an English translation of Daniel Charles’ Le temps de la voix (1978). Previous work has appeared in Contemporary Music Review, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music & Letters, Organised Sound, and The Senses & Society.

Gower, Sean

In Defense of Genius: A Network Analysis of Pauline Viardot’s Voice

On a leaf in Pauline Viardot’s album book, a new acquaintance penned an ode praising the singer for possessing an “angel’s voice.” The poem describes how Viardot’s singing quickly established familial bonds and seemed to possess a social power from another world. Dated 1838, such lines might be read simply as an éloge to a talented, seventeen-year-old diva. But there is another layer: Viardot as an intermediary to worlds beyond is a clever metaphor for an earthly network. Precociously, her voice creates links and translates forces from somewhere else, from art worlds beyond a local site. What connective forces compose the voice of a diva? How does that voice foster new social linkages within a network? This paper considers how Viardot’s voice both mediates and is mediated by a network. Everist (2001) highlights how Viardot played a collaborative role by influencing the reception of past music, and Borchard (2016) describes her as a composer “in dialogue” with others. I advance the conversation by addressing how Viardot’s early compositions and performances contributed to the social power of her voice. Focusing on Viardot’s first music publication, the Album de Mme. Viardot-Garcià of 1843, I explore how this song collection framed Viardot’s voice and helped shape an emergent artistic circle in Paris. The Album uses elements such as dedication, text, pictures, and musical style to inflect relationships and dynamics in Viardot’s circle. I draw on manuscripts and primary sources to show how the Album developed from 1837–1843. Across a number of events-involving human and non-human actors-Viardot and others modified the songs as they became associated with, and dedicated to, artistic friends in Paris. This paper reconsiders the relationship between individual and dispersed agency, showing the multiple agencies traced by Viardot’s composition and performance, while acknowledging her brilliance at consolidating, distilling, and refining the network.

Biography: Sean Gower is a PhD student in Musicology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the trans-urban spread of salon culture, particularly between cities in Europe and Latin America during the nineteenth century. Sean Gower previously served as the editorial assistant to the
Journal of the American Liszt Society (2018-2019). He holds two degrees from the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, a Master’s in Musicology, and a BA in Music with concentrations in Piano Performance and Musicology.

Asimov, Peter

Networking with Philologists in Fin-de-Siècle France

Nascent musicology in fin-de-siècle France may be situated within broader intellectual networks, particularly with respect to the discipline of comparative philology/linguistics. Comparative philology provided musicologists with a compelling disciplinary model: from François-Joseph Fétis’s declaration that comparative philology “provided the enlightenment which makes it possible to resolve heretofore unsolvable historical problems” to Jules Combarieu’s call in 1900 for musicologists to “link to philology an art without which one cannot have a complete understanding of civilisation”, the science of languages provided discourses and methods perceived as readily adaptable to the study of music. Most important, philology was already an institutionalised discipline with tremendous intellectual authority. In this paper, I chart the successive efforts of three generations of francophone musicologists to ‘network’ with communities of philologists. I conceive of networks not only as relational webs but also as the product of ‘networking’ – performative acts of scholarly affiliation and emulation, with the goal of appropriating not only philology’s methods, but also its authority. Such networking was articulated through relationships of professors and students; colleagues and partners; authors and readers; and took place in diverse spaces: professional institutions (universities, conservatoires, learned societies); social institutions (interest groups, salons); and in texts (letters, footnotes). After surveying these networks broadly, I zoom in on a dense cluster, showing how musicologists of different stripes—Bourgault-Ducoudray, Aubry, Emmanuel, and Mocquereau—networked with philologists such as Gaston Paris, Antoine Meillet, and Louis Havet, shaping musicology in reaction to interdisciplinary (and interpersonal) frictions. Finally, I indicate two realms in which these networks expand vastly: (1) through avenues of transnational exchange, in particular with colleagues in Germany and Russia; and (2) by demonstrating how these networks extended beyond the academy and shed new light on compositional practices.

Biography: Peter Asimov is Lumley Research Fellow in music at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and a
research associate at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. He has previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Université libre de Bruxelles. He received his PhD in 2020 from the University of Cambridge, with a thesis titled, ‘Comparative Philology, French Music, and the Composition of Indo-Europeanism from Fétis to Messiaen’. His research has published in 19th-Century Music, Musique-Images-Instruments, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association.

Hovi, Minna

Musical Curiosities and Invisible Networks – the Social Context of Tombeau and l’Offrande

In music history tombeau is described as a musical genre based on the French 17th-century lutenists way to remember a dead friend. The focus has been on composers instead of those persons to whom tombeaux were dedicated or the reasons why the first tombeaux were written in 1639 and 1649. In addition, the same lute players who composed tombeaux (or became later objects of tombeau) used titles such as l’Offrande, La belle homicide, l’Immortelle. Why? In my paper, I will focus on the social context of musical tombeaux and a lute piece titled l’Offrande. In 1649 King Charles I of England was executed, which was an exceptional moment in history. He became a martyr king and was remembered in England as well as in Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam. I argue that musical expression of l’Offrand as well as the title can be understand by taking into account how French lute players were related to the English royalists and their networks. It can be seen also by tracing Mr. Blancrocher’s (c.1602–1652) social background and the way how his only survived piece, l’Offrande, was disseminated and titled in the different manuscripts. Later Blancrocher was commemorated by four musical tombeaux. By using Blancrocher as an example I hope to shed some light on the musicians’ role in the wider social networks in which friendship was cultivated – at the same time my aim is to describe invisibility which relates to tombeau and its social context.

Biography: Minna Hovi is a PhD Candidate. She has graduated as a harpsichordist from the Sibelius Academy (MMus) and the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague (BA) and holds a Master’s degree from the university of Helsinki in musicology (MA).

Smith, Christopher and Irvine, Thomas

Pivot Points: Technology, Communications, and Actor-Network Theory in the Study of Global Musical Change and Exchange

Pivot Points: Technology, Communications, and Actor-Network Theory in the Study of Global Musical Change and Exchange Michael Denning’s Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution (Verso, 2015) develops a cultural geography of vernacular music as disseminated on 78rpm shellac records from approximately 1925-1935. In this crucial decade, Denning argues, a combination of technological factors—most notably the advent of electrical as opposed to acoustical recording, which in turn significantly enhanced the precision and dynamic range with which ensemble performances could be captured in sound—made 78s a central medium for the transmission of musical practices between and among subaltern communities. Though widely separated physically, he suggests, these networks can be traced through itineraries of the tramp steamer, in a “global archipelago” of trade within three zones: “the Gypsy Mediterranean,” “the Polynesian Pacific,” and “the Black Atlantic.” Our investigation takes Denning’s insight as a point of departure. Our aim, however, is broader. We seek a more nuanced understanding of the impact that such pivotal moments of technological change can have on musical networks (vernacular and otherwise), and to explore how they can be used to structure histories of such networks on a broader scale. We argue that modes of transportation and transmission (from sail to steam, and then coal to diesel; from surface communications to the telegraph) parallel those more familiar from music historiography (from manuscript reproduction to print, to linotype, and thence to acoustic reproduction). The dynamic interplay of musical and transportation technologies, and of the shifting and complicating networks in which they are embedded, has not yet been widely theorized. Drawing on (for example) actor-network theory as practiced in Science and Technology Studies, the materialist imperatives of soundscape studies, and the reframing gestures of global history, we explore how such changes to networks of people and objects can call forth changes to style, consumption, and aesthetic attitudes. Our presentation, part of a larger and more expansive project, offers a first look at the problem of a globally-inclusive model of musical change and exchange across long timespans.

Biography: Dr. Thomas Irvine is Associate Professor in Music at the University of Southampton. I work with students on music history from 1600 to the present on topics including eighteenth-century music, jazz history, music and the British Empire and British musical modernism. I have supervised
projects in eighteenth-century music, Sino-Western music history, British music from 1750 to the present, jazz history, performance studies and Web Science. I co-chair the American Musicological
Society study group ‘Global East Asia.’ Dr Christopher J. Smith is Professor and Chair of Musicology at the Texas Tech School of Music. He teaches courses in American, 20th century, and African Diasporic musics, as well as ethnomusicology topics, intercultural learning, and community arts entrepreneurship. He is the author of The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy and Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History (Illinois UP).

Amann-Rauter, Milena

“Avec mon arme, la musique”: Exiled Musicians and the French Popular Front Movement of the 1930ies

With the rise to power of the German Nazi Party in 1933 thousands of people were persecuted – most of them because of their Jewish descent or their political mindset. These events triggered a wave of emigration to foreign countries, including France. In French exile, a number of refugees showed interest in the Popular Front movement. The French Popular Front – an alliance of the communist, socialist and radical-socialist party – emerged at the end of 1934 and formed the government 1936-1938. Among the refugees who contributed to the rise of the Popular Front were several musicians. They performed, composed and agitated to uplift the labor movement and fight against fascism. In my PhD thesis, I examine how and under which conditions exiled musicians supported the French Popular Front. In my presentation, I will focus on two aspects of my dissertation. First, I will discuss the importance of social networks for the personal, musical and political life of exiled musicians in the context of the French Popular Front. Second, I will explain how I applied the network analysis method to analyze the various interconnections between exiled musicians and politics.

Biography: Milena Amann-Rauter is currently a PhD student in musicology at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. During the year 2018-2019 she was a visiting PhD student at the University of Chicago. Her educational background includes diplomas in orchestral conducting,
violin performance, music education and French that she received from the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, the University of Vienna, the École Normale de Musique de Paris and the Conservatoire de Musique et de Danse Aulnay-sous-Bois.