New Music & The North American Academy

An Interdisciplinary Symposium at SUNY Potsdam
April 13, 2012


For many producers of new music, institutions of higher education provide an important source of patronage, employment, and shelter from the conservative tastes of the concert-going public. Meanwhile, countless conservatory and music department mission statements celebrate colleges and universities as necessary access points for community members to enjoy contemporary fine arts. As colleges and universities grow and assume new roles in the twenty-first century, relationships between new music and the academy are continually redefined. This symposium hopes to promote lively discussion of the rich history of these partnerships and speculation upon possible future directions.

Part of a series of events throughout the 2011-12 academic year, this meeting celebrates the 125th anniversary of the founding of the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam. Throughout its history, the Crane School has been an active and enthusiastic player in the world of contemporary music. This history includes associations with many important musical figures of the 20th century, including conductors (Nadia Boulanger, Sarah Caldwell, Lukas Foss, Howard Hanson, Herman Scherchen, Robert Shaw, Leopold Stokowski, Michael Tilson Thomas) and composers from whom the Crane School has commissioned works (Norman Dello Joio, Libby Larsen, Vincent Persichetti, William Schuman, Virgil Thomson).

Schedule

9:30am to 11:00am – Session 1
Wakefield Recital Hall (Bishop Hall)

“Vincent Persichetti’s Works for Violin and Piano”
Michael Chikinda (University of Utah)

“Morton Feldman and the University at Buffalo”
Tim Sullivan (SUNY Potsdam)

“John Cage’s HPSCHD at the University of Illinois (1969)”
Sara Haefeli (Ithaca College)

11:00am to 12:00pm – Refreshments
Conference Room (left of Wakefield)

12:00pm to 1:45pm – Break/Lunch

1:45pm to 3:30pm – Session 2
Wakefield Recital Hall (Bishop Hall)

Lecture/Performance of Libby Larsen’s Yellow Jersey
Nelly Case (SUNY Potsdam)

“Approaches to Sonata Form in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Piano Sonatas”
Sarah Masterson (University of Connecticut)

“Aaron Copland and the Academy”
Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett (Aaron Copland Fund for Music)

3:30pm to 5:00pm – Break

5:00pm to 7:00pm – Dinner for Symposium Participants
(location TBA)

7:30pm to 9:30pm – Concert: Stephen Aron (Guitar) and Jane Berkner (Flute)
Snell Theater

Abstracts

Lecture/Performance of Libby Larsen’s Yellow Jersey
Nelly Case (SUNY Potsdam)

Libby Larsen is one of about two dozen Americans today who make a living strictly as composers of classical music and have no ongoing association with any academic institution.  She began composing during her teenage years, all the while absorbing a wide variety of musical styles—from the recordings of Broadway songs and stride boogie-woogie that her mother often played to the Gregorian chant she sang as a member of a Catholic grade school choir. Among her more than 200 compositions are works for orchestra, dance, chorus, opera, theater, chamber ensemble, and solo repertory for voice and instruments.

The versatility of Larsen’s style is shown by recent works like Yellow Jersey, commissioned by members of the clarinet studio of the Crane School of Music in 2004 in honor of their teacher Dr. Alan Woy, who retired that year after 33 years as clarinet professor at Crane. Inspired specifically by Lance Armstrong’s repeated victories in the Tour de France, Larsen describes the piece as a “short wind sprint” for two clarinets, which is played without pause and designed to imitate the successive physical stages of a bicycle race from the participants’ point of view. The title comes from the garment traditionally worn by the current leader during the Tour de France. In addition to unfailing rhythmic vitality and the frequent use of elements from American jazz and popular song, Larsen’s music is characteristically lyrical and uses dissonance freely within a generally tonal context—all elements well demonstrated by this performance and analysis of Yellow Jersey.

“Vincent Persichetti’s Works for Violin and Piano”
Michael Chikinda (University of Utah)

The place of ‘new music’ literature in the modern music school curriculum is in a tenuous position due to the plethora of compositional innovations that occurred in the 20th century. Indeed, many schools try to address this complicated issue by parsing the 20th century roughly in half (consider the Schwartz/Godfrey text Music Since 1945). However, this delimitation (of anywhere from 1945 to the death of Schoenberg in 1951) only complicates matters further because some of the influential composers studied in the first half of the 20th century continue to compose past this arbitrary divide. Vincent Persichetti is one such composer. Indeed, Persichetti’s compositional language, which has eluded scholars’ attempts to typify, experienced an important period of change in the 1950’s.

In my paper, I will use Persichetti as a case study about the problem of how to contextualize a cross-1950-threshold composer of the 20th century. Specifically, I will outline a collaborative project with my colleagues on a recording of the complete works for violin and piano by this often neglected composer, which includes a Fantasy that has never been published: two of my colleagues in the applied area will perform these works, and I will compile the liner notes. By outlining the importance of this project in connection to the reception of Persichetti’s oeuvre, I also hope to address the larger issue of new music pedagogy in the contemporary music department: how do we transcend the role of the museum curator who affixes labels of time delimitations to static exhibits to become interpreters/advocates of a composer’s oeuvre that cannot be contained or properly appreciated by such labels.

“Aaron Copland and the Academy”
Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett (Aaron Copland Fund for Music)

In examining the role of the North American academy in new music, Aaron Copland presents an intriguing case. He never earned a college degree, but instead spent two years in France as one of Nadia Boulanger’s first American students. Later, he contributed to North American higher education through guest lectures and visiting appointments, at the New School for Social Research, Harvard (1935, 1944, and 1951-52) and the University of Buffalo (1957-58); he amassed a substantial collection of honorary doctorates. Even then, Copland’s primary support came from compositions and activities directed toward less specialized audiences: film scores for Hollywood, royalties earned by his more conservative works, writings, lectures, conducting engagements, and goodwill tours for the U.S. State Department. Academic music departments tended simultaneously to respect his achievements while considering his music insufficiently “new.”

Copland’s case also raises an important question: how may Red Scare politics have influenced the development of new music in North American colleges and universities? While many music departments were a haven for composers of experimental and electronic music in the 1950s and 1960s, these institutions also experienced considerable pressure to exclude composers with past ties to “communist fronts.” This paper uses primary documents from Copland’s FBI file and State Department archives, recent scholarship on the McCarthy Era, and the work of musicologists including Perlis, Pollack, Abrams Ansari and Crist to analyze the ways partisan politics and anti-communist policies limited Copland’s academic opportunities in the decades after World War II.

 “John Cage’s HPSCHD at the University of Illinois (1969)”
Sara Haefeli (Ithaca College)

In 1967–69 John Cage collaborated with Lejaren Hiller at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to create one of the first computer-assisted compositions, HPSCHD. Despite the fact that Cage promoted himself as anti-traditional and anti-institutional in the popular press, he worked comfortably in the university setting, and indeed, the resources that the university provided could not have been found elsewhere. These resources included funding for the project; access to state-of-the-art computer facilities; collaborators from the fields of computer science, visual arts, and film; a unique performance space capable of holding thousands of concert- goers; equipment and instruments (such as seven harpsichords, fifty-one loud speakers, film and slide projectors); and an audience that was uniquely receptive to new music.

There is much about Cage’s tenure at the University of Illinois that is quite traditional, and the experimental nature of the work he produced there was also typical of the kind of work valued in the university during the late 1960s. This paper is an examination of Cage’s relationship to the institution of higher education and to the institutional musical tradition. In contrast to FLUXUS composers who eschewed complexity in favor of simplicity, for this project Cage worked firmly within the structured university system and produced a highly complex piece. While HPSCHD may have been interpreted by the press as a Midwest “Happening,” it was closer in spirit, program, and construction to the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk.

“Approaches to Sonata Form in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Piano Sonatas”
Sarah Masterson (University of Connecticut)

Discussions of mid-twentieth century works for solo piano express a common misconception that the sonata as a musical form had become obsolete, whereas there are in fact a number of American piano sonatas from this period that retain certain tonal and formal characteristics of classical sonata form.  Such works seem to have been inspired in part by an interest in Classical compositional techniques at institutions of higher education, as well as by the influence of the neoclassical movement in early twentieth-century Europe.

This study explores how aspects of traditional sonata form are combined with neotonal techniques in first movements of piano sonatas composed in the United States in the decade following World War II (approximately 1945-1955).  It focuses on works by Leo Sowerby, Robert Starer, Hans Barth, and James Beale, all of whom were affiliated with institutions of higher education.  An examination of formal designs and tonal relationships in these sonatas reveals specific types of connections to classical models that are retained and adapted to a distinctly twentieth-century harmonic language.  These works can be considered neotonal, in that different tonal centers are established in different sections.  Most of them retain traditional tonic-dominant relationships between sections and themes, whereas a second category employs similar contrasts based on non-traditional tonal relationships.  The decision of these composers to build upon, rather than reject conventions of Classical sonata form reflects the influence of their activity as longstanding faculty members, and of their interactions with other scholars and performers in American conservatories and universities.

 “Morton Feldman and the University at Buffalo”
Tim Sullivan (SUNY Potsdam)

An interesting case study of the relationship between academia and new music in America can be found in the New York School of composers (John Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown). In contrast to many 20th-century American composers that had advanced university training, and who often immediately took up a teaching position upon completion of studies, the four composers of the New York School had spotty formal composition training (if at all). Nonetheless, all four of these composers had University positions or residencies at some point in their career.

In this paper, I will examine the role that academia played in the careers of the New York School of composers, with particular emphasis on Morton Feldman. From 1972 until his death, Feldman held the position of Edgard Varèse Professor of Composition at the University at Buffalo. There were several lasting consequences of Feldman’s time at UB, not the least of which was allowing him to make a living from composing and teaching for the first time in his career. Feldman was also instrumental in the founding of the influential (and still active) June in Buffalo summer festival. Most importantly, Feldman’s time at UB corresponds with a drastic shift in his compositional style, away from the indeterminate pieces of the ’50s and ’60s, and towards the extended textural canvases of his late style.

Logistics

Contact Information

Questions and comments should be directed to the conference organizers: