Conference Agenda

This panel confronts and problematizes the conspicuous dearth of female identity and agency in both the music of Russian composers and in Russian music historiography. We address this absence through three case-studies: that of the female voice rendered inaudible in song and performing traditions, the privileging of male-centered narratives of musical achievement and status, and the challenge of interpreting female agency and power on the operatic stage. Our approach does not seek to reinscribe or center supposedly “feminine” characteristics or roles either creatively or historically, but rather focuses on how we might unpick the ways in which women have been presented via a male-dominated perspective, and by doing so, come to recognize and challenge our own complicity in these narratives. Lying behind each case-study are networks of assumptions that have become so familiar that attempting to deconstruct them even feels artificial: why shouldn’t Musorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death be sung by men?; isn’t it true that he wrote his ‘Polish Scene’ just to appease the Imperial Theater’s demand for a female role and weakened Boris Godunov as a result?; isn’t it true that almost all the great Russian composers and pianists have been male?; and isn’t it true that Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth was a victim of her own sexual voraciousness?

Yet once we have taken the time to question these familiar narratives, other personalities, professional and social behaviors and values begin to emerge from the shadows. Perhaps these Russian women had more influence and agency than we had realized: they shaped their traditional domestic roles to wield that influence upon the professional musical sphere, working with male artists and composers at high professional levels, only fading from public recognition and memory once replaced by men. And although to this day there is not a single Russian female operatic protagonist devised entirely (from literary source, to opera composition and staging) – by women, when a Russian composer sincerely attempted to liberate his heroine from a century’s worth of convention, his creation stubbornly remained one seen exclusively through the male gaze, and remains so to this day.

Studies of nineteenth-century Russian musical life have tended to foreground the work of men. This is certainly true of Modest Musorgsky, whose life is often seen in the context of the male coterie that made up the moguchaya kuchka (Cui, Balakirev, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov and Musorgsky, with Stasov as their spokesperson). By contrast, his personal and above all creative engagement with a series of Russian women has often been downplayed or overlooked in critical and biographical writing. The revised version of his opera, Boris Godunov, is, for instance, often seen as a compromise with the Imperial Theaters Directorate’s demands, or as an expedient vehicle for Yuliya Platonova (for whom the part of Marina Mniszech was written). And the tour he undertook with the contralto, Darya Leonova, in 1879 is treated as the caprice of a faded diva (that is certainly how Rimsky-Korsakov and a number of Musorgsky’s other friends saw it).

This paper will reconsider Musorgsky’s life and works through the prism of his relationships with a series of female musicians, focusing in particular on his lyric works, and above all, the song cycle, Songs and Dances of Death. Its four songs were originally part of a planned cycle of twelve depictions of death – a feminine noun in Russian (smert’) – and to be published under the title Ona (She). A performing tradition that has centered on Fyodor Shalyapin and his legacy has tended to assume that Musorgsky’s vocal preference in this cycle was for a dramatic, not to say histrionic male voice. However, Musorgsky’s tour with Leonova, as well as his collaboration with a number of other female vocalists, allow us to posit that his imagined vocal type in the cycle was female, or at least inflected by his experience of hearing his songs performed by female vocalists (such as Aleksandra Purgol’d-Molas). Whilst such an approach risks reinscribing traditional notions of women as muses and helpmates, it can potentially open up the field of nineteenth-century Russian music studies to a wider range of sources, decenter a common focus on male composers, and emphasize the importance of collaboration and co-creation.

While every new opera production ushers in a new interpretation of its protagonists, Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk offers us such a problematic heroine that even minor details of staging can shift the balance of sympathy towards her. Examining the original Leningrad staging reveals a "timid, frightened"; Katerina, while - perversely - her character in the revised version of the opera (Katerina Izmailova, premiered 1961) seems to have repelled critics in a way that the original Katerina did not. If Shostakovich hoped to render Katerina more respectable by cutting the Act One sex scene with the worker Sergey (as he did for the revision of the opera in the 1950s), he seems to have achieved the opposite effect as far as critics were concerned.

Since the premiere of the much-hyped restored "original"; Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk recorded by Rostropovich in 1979, which sounded the death-knell for the revised Katerina Izmailova, the character of Katerina is frequently presented as that of a strong, liberated woman (largely) in control of her destiny. Contemporary tropes of femininity play a key role in shaping both production and reception of this opera, and this is as true now as it was in Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Drawing on recent interviews with producers, singers and music directors as well as contemporary sources from the 1930s, this paper ponders whether, in asserting what he thought of as Katerina's feminine agency, we might be in danger of erasing the heroine Shostakovich wanted us to love.

Musicology has recently begun to turn its attention towards Russian female composers of the pre-Revolutionary period. Leokadiya Kashperova, for example, was little more than a footnote as Stravinsky’s piano teacher, but she is increasingly seen as a significant musical figure in her own right. There have been ground-breaking studies (Griffiths, Lomtev) of Russian female composers, and such research will doubtless yield further names and scores, but it will not in itself change the music-historical narrative of a succession of great male artists. I propose to investigate women like Kashperova, not in order to slot one more woman into that succession, but to construct a new historical narrative in which (male) Russian composers were formed as musicians by musically educated mothers and governesses, and by (female) piano teachers. In order to build the case, a background study of 19th-century Russian female pianism is required, but this topic remains almost untouched by scholarship. My primary interest here is the social history behind the rise of female pianists and pedagogues.

Noblewomen in 19^th-century Russia were educated so that they could ensure that their children had a high cultural level. Charitable institutions educated girls from lower social classes (often orphans) to enable them to work as governesses, and piano lessons were a standard part of this education. When music conservatories were established in Russia from the 1860s onwards, women, accordingly, formed the majority of piano students. Although public performance was considered beneath the dignity of Russian noblewomen, it gave middle-class women a chance to rise. By the early 20^th century, specialized music schools were generally run by a female owner/director and employed a largely female staff.

Mapping out this history will help us to reconceptualize the role of women in music. We will be able to see that female musicians became the mainstay, and even the leaders of Russia’s piano-centered musical tradition. Women would spark a child’s first musical interests, women would foster the obsessive hard work needed by prodigies, and women transmitted the secrets of the Russian School of piano technique across the generations.

Organized by the AMS Skills and Resources for Early Musics Study Group

This round table discussion with hands-on activities addresses the following questions: How do digital tools inform us about the formation and circulation of sacred musics and their sources (manuscript or otherwise)? What new tools are being created and what are the necessary skills, methods, and theoretical frameworks to implement them? What resources can be created and shared to help young scholars and students to approach research about sacred music? How can notions of representation and ability/disability be addressed at the interface between Digital Humanities and the research on sacred and liturgical music? The session will be divided as follows: 50 minutes for presentations followed by a 5-10 minute break, about 20 minutes of hands-on activities, and finally about 40 minutes for a round table discussion.

Session Co-chairs: Suzanna Feldkamp (Case Western Reserve University) and Christina Kim (Stanford University)

Nicholas Bleish (Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven), Henry Drummond (Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven), Richard Haefer (Arizona State University): “Collaborative, Crowdsourced Digital Humanities Initiatives, Databases for the Study of Chant in the Americas and the Low Countries”

Lucia Denk (Princeton University), Madeline Styskal (The University of Texas, Austin), Dmitriy Stegall (The University of Texas, Austin): “Compiling Fragments of East and West: Digital Sources in Latin and Church Slavonic”

James Cook (University of Edinburgh), Adam Whittaker (RoyalBirmingham Conservatoire), Ralph Corrigan (independent scholar), Gillian Gower (UCLA/University of Edinburgh): “Digital Prosopographies, Digital Possibilities: The Digital Prosopography of Pre-Reformation Scottish Music Project”

Addi Liu (Cornell University): “Spirals, Ladders, and Loops: Cataloging Guidonian Hands with Notion”

Margot Fassler (University of Notre Dame) and Eleonora Celora (University of Notre Dame): “Teaching the Medieval Liturgy Online: A Taxonomy Featuring the 'Music Tab'"

For a century, scholarship on Maurice Ravel has drawn on the language of irony, imposture, disguise, and illusion in order to describe the strange effects his music produces and to locate the notoriously aloof composer as a historical subject. Accordingly, Ravel and his works have tempted scholars with the possibility of their “unmasking,” with the recovery of some truth or identity concealed beneath an artificial façade. This temptation has sustained Ravel Studies for so long despite—or because of—its ultimate impossibility: The rhetoric of disguise and disillusionment primes us to think of any “true” face that emerges from behind one of Ravel’s masks as itself another mask. Recognizing this, the three papers that make up this panel do not aim simply to unmask the composer or his works. Instead, they explore the strange and contradictory implications of Ravel’s aesthetic of imposture, and they examine how a discourse centered on artifice has determined the course of Ravel Studies. Finally, using methods that blend historical inquiry with theory and analysis, they introduce new terms and frameworks by which to conceive of the composer and his works. Rather than disappearance and rediscovery, these scholars together might be said to reimagine Ravel Studies according to the logic of the “lost-and-found,” a repository of radical potential whose collection of musical odds and ends confuses the notions of generic and unique, old and new, disappeared and recovered.

Ravel’s compositions feature spectacularly orchestrated passages that at once demonstrate his practice and dedication to existing models, and, particularly after the war, challenge and develop conventional wisdom from the orchestration treatises and compositions he so ardently studied. An intriguing thread within Ravel scholarship highlights the way his compositions evoke certain sounds and effects; however, the objective often aims to unmask some inherent quality in his music in relation to irony or artifice. Timbral observations like Orenstein’s surprise that “the flute will evoke a trumpet, and the piano a gong” or Russ’s claim that “when a harp seems the obvious choice, Ravel substitutes the celesta,” seem to walk right up to one of the most compelling aspects of Ravel’s sound, only to abandon further questioning of it. Musically, Ravel does something similar. Through his orchestrations, he conjures a certain sound or instrumental combination, only to abandon that sound, leaving one wondering if what they heard was real or not.

Ravel’s interest in sound becomes most pronounced in his works and communication after the war. In correspondence, he spoke more and more about jazz, cinema, factories, futurists, as well as the loud speaker, microphone, and radio. His participation in sound recordings as a member of the Thomson Music Committee was charged to “follow the work of engineers closely” and gave him a front seat to technological sound advances. And while he never fully embraced avant-garde techniques, evidence in his music indicates a much more progressive approach to sound than has previously been granted. In many ways, the record age apothegm of “any sound imaginable” can be detected in his late compositions through the ways he orchestrated acoustic instruments to sound like electric and modern sound objects. By looking closely at interwar compositions, my analysis blends orchestration and timbre studies to illustrate new approaches to Ravel’s sound.

Music historians and theorists have long recognized the “unresolved appoggiatura” as a significant feature of Ravel’s works. Still, even as scholars describe the strange sonic effects these ornaments can have, Ravel studies has not yet grappled with the fundamental paradox of their dissonance—and with what this paradox can teach us about this music and its analysis.

The Forlane from Le Tombeau de Couperin exemplifies the contradictory implications of the unresolved appoggiatura. Here, pitches project a melodic resolution because of their dissonance with another sounding note, even as their ultimate irresolution implies that they are harmonic and consonant (and that the other apparently consonant note is in fact the “source” of the dissonance). The density of these ornaments in Ravel’s movement renders its pitch-structure indeterminate, as their ambivalence reveals any claims to certain notes’ structural priority (consonance) as arbitrary. Indeed, the Forlane’s refrain challenges the listener to follow multiple competing interpretations of its harmonic structure simultaneously.

The Forlane’s unresolved appoggiaturas also have implications beyond pitch-structure. Because these ornamental notes encode a Forlane by Couperin (the model for Ravel’s composition) through their modernist artifice, the indeterminacy of the unresolved appoggiaturas shows their representation of this original music to be similarly paradoxical: The more prior music can only be understood on the basis of its artificial representation, and yet this artifice is meaningful only as it refers us to where that original music is supposed to have been. In demonstrating this, Ravel’s movement anticipates and deconstructs later accounts of the work’s neoclassicism in terms of reverent reproduction or uncanny possession.

Lastly, in revealing a slippage between the harmonic and melodic and between the referential and objective, the Forlane’s unresolved appoggiaturas outline an ambivalent position vis-à-vis contemporary néoclassicisme, a movement that decried the evocative harmonies of prewar composers and instead prioritized melody in pursuit of objectivity. Recognizing this, we might revisit the fraught question of Ravel’s relevance to the neoclassicist avant-garde—not to settle the composer’s aesthetic allegiances, but to better appreciate the forces that produce critics’ seemingly contradictory descriptions of the composer as at once a relic of prewar Romanticism and a high modernist.

A valuable find in Ravel schoIarship is an anecdote shared by his student and biographer Roland-Manuel shortly after the composer’s death in 1937. According to Roland-Manuel, Ravel liked to recite the Baudelairean aphorism, “To create a poncif is genius.” Ravel would presumably also have known that this aphorism was a note-to-self, since the next sentence in Baudelaire’s jotting was “I should create a poncif.” What is a poncif? And did Ravel ever take Baudelaire’s directive to heart and try to create one in music?

The most common meaning for poncif is and was “cliché,” but the term also historically refers to a perforated sheet used as a template for creating multiple copies—just as “cliché” and “stereotype” originally referred to devices for mechanical reproduction in both printing and photography. Captivated by such technologies and the role they played in the emergence of mass culture, Walter Benjamin took special note of Baudelaire’s passage in The Arcades Project and interpreted it as the poet’s desire to develop a “market-oriented originality.” Nonetheless, this enthusiasm for the poncif on the part of Baudelaire, Benjamin, and Ravel remained abstract. They neither explained how this concept might apply to (their) art nor provided a concrete example.

My presentation seeks to fill in this gap. I begin by defining the Baudelairean poncif as it applies to art—a creation that forfeits strong claims to originality, good taste, sophistication, and prestige for the sake of augmenting its cultural influence and circulation. I then identify Ravel’s Bolero as a possible example of the artistic poncif and use the latter as a lens through which to view its genesis, musical structure, and performance history.

Organized by the AMS Cold War Music Study Group

Recent historical scholarship has shown that the battle between communism and capitalism was as much a spiritual contest as it was a geopolitical one. We might, as Diane Kirby has written, think of the Cold War as “a global conflict between the god-fearing and the godless” (2003). Jonathan P. Herzog, for example, has argued that American politicians saw religion (and specifically Christianity) as a key component that both differentiated the United States from the Soviet Union as well as placed a special urgency on the former’s triumph over the latter (2011). At the same time, following Marx’s dictum that “religion [was] the opium of the masses,” the Soviet Union sought to replace Tsarist-era religion with state-sponsored atheism. The result, as Victoria Smolkin has demonstrated, transformed atheism into a pseudo-spiritual cosmology (2018). Present in global conflicts in Korean (e.g., Chang 2014) and Vietnam as well as de- and post-colonial change in the Middle East and Africa, spiritual identity cooperated with political alignment as a tool for both propaganda and resistance. As countries around the world grappled with both Western and Soviet colonialism, religious pluralities had to be negotiated alongside resurgent national identities.

Asking how music, sound, and spirituality were entangled in Cold War geopolitics, this panel features three twenty-minute papers that reach across North America and Eastern Europe as well as religious identities. Each paper considers the Cold War from a different geographical and spiritual perspective: Catholicism in Eastern Bloc Poland; Christianity in the United States; and Islam in the Soviet Union. Our first presenter considers the connections between Pope John Paul II, Polish anti-communist protest, and music. Connecting Catholicism to composers such as Penderecki and Panufnik, she positions religion as a lens through which critics, composers, and listeners expressed their political and personal views about the state. Our second paper takes a deep dive into the Willis Conover Collection at the University of North Texas to explore the dynamics between Christian belief and US politics as they appeared in Conover's broadcasts to the socialist world for the Voice of America. And in our third paper, the author uses opera in Soviet Kazakhstan to explore gender, spirituality, and colonialism in Islamic music in the very final year of the Soviet empire. Taken together, these three papers (as well as a response from a respondent) ask critical questions about how Cold War geopolitics and spiritual identities manifested in music.

In 1978, Krakow’s Archbishop Karol Wojtyła was elected to papacy and became Pope John Paul II. In 1980, the Solidarity trade union led by Lech Wałęsa began strikes at the Gdansk shipyard. A great hope for change and liberating political rules in the country was awakened in Polish society. Composers to a large extent became their exponents, joining their fellow citizens in protesting against oppressive communist authority. The Catholic Church, which had been perceived as the strongest opposition force since the beginning of communism, under the leadership of the Polish Pope significantly strengthened its role as a defender of freedom and opposition to communist authority. The election of the Polish Pope also became an inspiration for composers resulting in an increased interest in works of a religious nature. In the 1980s, during the period of Solidarity and the martial law imposed by the government in December 1981, writing works of religious expression was in many cases a gesture of not merely artistic but also political nature.

In my paper, I present this period in Polish music in the context of its relationship to the political situation in the country. In the difficult decade between 1978 and 1987, which with no hesitation can be called a time of hope and despair, many extremely important compositions were produced. From works dedicated to the John Paul II, as Henryk Mikołaj Górecki's Beatus Vir and Totus Tuus, Roman Palester’s Te Deum, Krzysztof Penderecki’s Te Deum, or Augustyn Bloch’s Anenaiki to the significant symphonies of the 1980s, such as Andrzej Panufnik’s Sinfonia Votiva, Penderecki’s Symphony No. 2 or Krzysztof Meyer’s Symphony No. 6 “Polish”, and the most emblematic work of the time: Penderecki’s Polish Requiem – the music testifies to the strong connection between religion and politics. What did these works mean for their creators, how were they received by audiences, critics, and the authorities? How significant was this “religious awakening” for the compositional style of the composers and their position in the musical world of the time? In my paper I will attempt to discuss these questions, focusing on selected musical examples.

Broadcast records in the Willis Conover Collection at the University of North Texas Music Library show that, on average, a six-week delay separated the completion of Willis Conover’s programs and their airing on the Voice of America. While the delays inherent in distributing programs on tape presented obvious challenges for breaking news or experiencing events in the moment, Conover occasionally presented recordings of events where their enduring significance overrode the limitations on immediate access, such as jazz festivals and major concerts.

Such events also included the funerals of Louis Armstrong in 1971, and of Duke Ellington in 1974, though the latter was not broadcast until 1975. Conover’s Jazz Hour presented these funerals as they happened, with all of their religious content. As with Conover’s approach to presenting music, the broadcasts did not tell listeners what to think of what they were hearing, but simply made it available. Indeed, the mere accessibility of such content was a transgressive act in defiance of regimes that marginalized, suppressed, or purged religious belief and expression in their societies.

These funerals contained frank expressions of religious belief, demonstrating freedom of religion in action. Broadcasting the events in unedited reinforced the fact that they were not embellished or selectively cropped out of context for propaganda. The programs containing the funerals are preserved in the collections of the UNT Music Library (Ellington) and the Louis Armstrong House Museum (Armstrong), and include scriptural readings, major prayers of the Christian tradition (the Apostles’ Creed and the Our Father), invocations by clergy of multiple denominations, hymns, and in the case of Ellington, his own religious works.

As noted earlier, those who tuned in were free to do what they wished with this content, but one may surmise the seeds that broadcasters hoped to plant in the thoughts of their listeners: above all, a look at freedom of belief and expression in American society. This presentation will include highlights from these digitized broadcasts, look at available documentation within archival collections, and situate the content in the larger context of religious programming on the Voice of America.

Amidst the Cold-War arms race and cultural and scientific rivalry, the Soviet state sponsored two major projects of environmental colonialism in the Kazakh Republic: the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site (1949 to 1991) and the Baikonur Space Station (established in 1955). In official narratives these projects figured as affirmations of the USSR’s superiority. To many Kazakhs, however, they represented the state’s continued neglect of Kazakh wellbeing that previously manifested through the mass famine, caused by collectivization, and the anti-religious campaign. Spiritual and anti-nuclear struggles figure prominently in the last Soviet Kazakh opera—Gaziza Zhubanova’s Burannyi Yedygei (1991), completed in October, 1991, on the eve of Kazakhstan’s secession from the USSR. Based on Chingiz Aitmatov’s I dol’she veka dlitsia den’ (1980), the opera foregrounds the indigenous struggle against erasure of collective memory and Sufi practices. Zhubanova amplifies the collision between modernity and oppressed spirituality by intertwining references to the dire environmental and human impact of nuclear testing.

Analyzing the archival manuscript of the opera—which to this day was neither published nor performed—this paper argues that Burannyi Yedygei presents a culmination of Zhubanova’s long-term decolonial resistance to Soviet suppression of collective memory, cultural assimilation, and spiritual erasure. My analysis demonstrates Zhubanova’s breakaway from the officially sanctioned folk-based Kazakh national musical language as featured in earlier operas by composers like Yevgeny Brusilovsky and Akhmet Zhubanov (her father). Furthermore, I show that by using modernist compositional techniques, such as hyperdissonance, excessive deployment of percussion instruments, and emphasis of the female voice, Zhubanova resisted old ornamentalist tropes to contest political subordination and spiritual erasure. For example, the recurring lullaby leitmotif of Naiman-Ana—a white bird that personifies the spirit of a deceased mother—functions as a mnemonic chant to reinscribe cultural memory. Ultimately, through my examination of Burannyi Yedygei, I seek to contribute to the renewed interest in the impact of Soviet antireligious policies in the republics that practiced various forms of Islam prior to Sovietization. I contend that Cold-War politics in Soviet “peripheries,” amplified environmental, military, economic, and antireligious oppression that produced either spiritually or physically dead subjects.

Now, decades after the founding of popular music studies and the new musicology debates, (almost) no one questions popular music’s place in our curricula. But what exact part does popular music play in the curriculum?

At a moment where many departments are revising program requirements and course offerings with the aim to diversify and decolonize the curriculum, popular music offers its own solutions and challenges. For example: Popular music may already be an antidote to the elitism of Western classical music, but the ubiquitous “History of Rock” and “History of Jazz” classes also threaten to calcify into canonic lineages of great men. In our curricula, popular music classes (alongside world music) present the greatest diversity of musicians of color, queer artists, and working-class audiences, yet most popular music textbooks rarely go beyond the borders of the US and the UK.

How might we identify and solve such challenges? What might popular music studies learn from its own pedagogical past? What pedagogies might popular music studies learn from or teach other subdisciplines of musicology?

In this keynote address, Suzi Analogue (UNC Chapel Hill Music), an innovative force at the crossroads of music production, technology, and pedagogy, presents "Soundscapes Of Learning: Rhythm Rhymes & Revolution in Education." Drawing on her multifaceted expertise, Suzi will expound on a pioneering approach to education, demonstrating how sound and rhythm can invigorate pedagogical methods and ignite a transformative learning experience.

Suzi's presentation will unveil a pedagogical paradigm that celebrates the profound impact of auditory stimuli on cognition, memory retention, and critical thinking and culture. Through a compelling synthesis of personal experiences, empirical research, and dynamic case studies, she illustrates how the integration of sound and rhythm amplifies engagement, breaking down traditional learning barriers.

Furthermore, Suzi Analogue will introduce a forward-thinking perspective on inclusivity in education. By incorporating rhythm and rhyme, educators can create a harmonious learning environment that resonates with diverse learning styles and backgrounds. Her insights challenge conventional pedagogical practices, paving the way for a more accessible and empowering educational landscape.

Moreover, Suzi will demonstrate how technology serves as an enabler, not a disruptor, in this pedagogical revolution. By leveraging digital tools and interactive platforms, educators can craft immersive auditory experiences that harness the full potential of today's tech-driven learners.

Join as Suzi Analogue guides us through a captivating exploration of "Soundscapes Of Learning," challenging us to rethink the very essence of pedagogy in higher education. Together, we will embark on a revolution in teaching and learning that promises a more inclusive, dynamic, and student-centered educational landscape.

After years of teaching courses devoted to popular music, I found that my students were more engaged during units in which we analyzed music videos. Eventually, I added so much music video content to these courses that I developed a separate class devoted entirely to music videos. My pedagogical approaches, repertoire, and theoretical framework eventually coalesced into the textbook Interpreting Music Video: Popular Music in the Post-MTV Era (Routledge, 2021). In this short panel presentation, I’ll share how a course on music videos can address some of the challenges institutions are facing in efforts to diversify and decolonize our curricula. First, if you want to decenter white men, you have to decenter “rock.” A history of the 1990s, for example, should center on hip-hop videos by Public Enemy and Queen Latifah that foreground the struggles facing Black people in urban environments. Second, while it’s true that MTV aired mostly videos from the US and UK, the advent of YouTube opened up a new world of videos that are just as worthy of study. “Gangnam Style” (2012) and “Despacito” (2017) are among the most famous, but Asma Lamnawar’s “Andou Zine” and Oumou Sangaré’s “Kamelemba” offer students a valuable glimpse into cultures and experiences that they’ve probably never encountered. Third, if we want to decolonize our coverage of music videos from the Western hemisphere, we must look to those created by Indigenous musicians. Supaman’s video “Why” (ft. Acosia Red Elk), for example, uses traditional Apsáalooke instruments and dance to convey an English-language message about the struggles faced by his people. Music videos solve the challenges named above better than recorded audio alone. Their vital role in today’s curriculum stems from the power of words, music, and images to combine into a rich audiovisual message of resistance.

Differentiated instruction (DI) emphasizes “adaptation of aspects of instruction to differences between students” (van Geel et al. 2019). DI encourages students to demonstrate core learning goals in a way that utilizes their strengths and prior experiences. This paper presents some ways the author employed DI in a seminar on the theory and analysis of popular music, as well as some ideas for future improvements to this and similar courses. I have taught this course at multiple universities, to students with a variety of musical backgrounds, including MM, MA, DMA, and PhD students in various programs. Recently I proposed the course become a cross-listed elective that includes undergraduates too.

One thing students found particularly useful was the weekly analysis assignments in an open-ended format. Students were given multiple pieces to choose from that related to the weekly topic (such as timbre and texture, form, or metrical dissonance). They were instructed to make a representation of some aspect of the music, such as “a form chart or timeline, transcription into some kind of notation, DAW recreation, spectrogram or waveform, line graph or bar graph, or any other kind of visual representation.” They were also directed to write a few sentences accompanying their diagram(s), making meaning of their observations. Knowing that some students have less experience with musical analysis than others, I encouraged them to be creative in representing how they understand the music. Students appreciated the openness of this exercise, however one area they suggested for improvement was providing future opportunities to revisit some diagrams and “polish” them based on prior feedback. These assignments were just one way DI was incorporated into the class, but they may inspire others to include similar opportunities for students with varying backgrounds and vocabularies to express their understanding of any aspect of popular music.

One danger of teaching popular music is that students are too familiar with the music, thereby lacking the aesthetic distance to appreciate it. This particularly rings true when one teaches speech-melody relationships in Cantonese popular music to native Cantonese speakers. If students are native Cantonese speakers, they find it difficult to appreciate how hard it is to map Cantonese speech tones onto melodic tones, because they are the authority to decide whether Cantonese tones are mapped naturally onto a musical interval.
In this paper, I present a short introduction of one lecture I delivered in a course on Cantopop for a group of master’s students in Hong Kong, which offered students an opportunity to unlearn their native tongue. Since most students in Hong Kong do not learn Cantonese in a systematic way in schools, in that lecture, I first presented a general introduction of Cantonese speech tones, and presented a methodology as to how to map them onto melodic intervals. I then divided them into groups, and asked them to compose a twelve-bar melody with obsolete Chinese characters that are not in use anymore. They had to re-learn their pronunciations, and fit them onto a melody as if they were non-native speakers. They were then asked to perform their work, and in my experience, the “mediocre” performances made them realize how difficult it is for a non-native Cantonese speaker to write lyrics to a melody.
Through this case study, I wish to suggest that to expand the purview of popular music, we can approach popular music in the curriculum or within the instructor’s expertise from the perspective of an outsider’s culture, thus de-centering students’ perspective of knowledge, and defamiliarize their musical knowledge with which they might believe they are most familiar in the process of unlearning.

This presentation is a reflection on my experience of rebuilding and delivering "Introduction to Jazz" for an undergraduate class of 126 students at UNC-Chapel Hill in the fall of 2022. Initially, the class's structure represented the collision of my positionality as a teacher of color and practicing jazz artist with “ungrading”: a praxis of “pedagogical disobedience” that I sought to refine through the philosophies of bell hooks, the assessment strategies of Jesse Stommel, and the critical listening practices of jazz scholars David Ake and Vilde Aaslid. Over the course of the semester, I attempted to maintain a dynamic approach to curriculum and pedagogy through conversation with my two graduate colleagues (who doubled as teaching assistants) and my PhD research cohort at large, while evaluating the social, aesthetic, and political questioning that my students brought (and at times didn't bring) to the table. Through these interactions, what developed substantially for me was a conviction for decolonial jazz pedagogy as the integration of critical, long-form listening and short-form writing into the undergraduate student's lifeworld.

Following this narrative, I share some of the revisions and reorganizations made to the "Introduction to Jazz" syllabus and curriculum, the learning environments we devised, and the creative research outputs generated by the students. In particular, I discuss our radical restructuring of class content around 1973 and the decision of Roe v. Wade as a midpoint for jazz history, our devotion of substantial in- and out-of-class minutes to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, and the gradual handover of class content and grading power from myself to my teaching colleagues and students. I also highlight some of the crossmodal, interdisciplinary work that students undertook as they capaciously interpreted our call for a final research project through musical composition, oral history and lifewriting, ethnographically-grounded visual art, and the digital humanities.

Academia, and the humanities in particular, is pushing diversity initiatives, specifically through calls to include Afro-diasporic and hip hop culture in the curriculum of music programs, conservatories, and departments. As a non-Black woman of color who has benefited from this particular attempt towards diversity, I wrestle with the problem of teaching disrespectability politics in an institution of respectability, namely, teaching college courses on hip hop and its “ratchet” discourse and politics of irreverence (Chepp 2015). In exploring this topic through the medium of a conference paper, I use the phenomenological approach of Frantz Fanon (1952), bell hooks (1992) and Jennifer Nash (2014), as well as my own personal experience as an educator, to ask such questions as: Is the act of teaching disrespectability in an institution of respectability a colonial act? Is theorizing disrespectability an act of concluding, assuming a post-respectability politics reality? Does placing hip hop into a syllabus and confining it to theoretical frameworks quicken hip hop culture’s conclusion? In asking these and other questions, I hope to uncover the complicated, and potentially problematic nature of teaching Black popular culture, specifically American hip hop, in institutions of higher education.

The so-called renaissance of American opera that began in the 1980s has elicited significant attention in recent years. Countering a pervasive discourse around operatic obsolescence (Abbate and Parker 2015, Wiebe 2009, Žižek and Dolar 2002), musicologists have looked to operas by Glass, Adams, and others for evidence of ongoing modernist challenges to the genre (Gutkin 2014, Metcalf 2017) as well as its contemporary political and social valences (Ebright 2019, Fink 2005, Renihan 2020). These concerns have extended into the present, with scholars giving particular attention to operatic experimentation in non-traditional spaces, often by non-traditional companies (Kreuzer 2021, Steigerwald Ille 2021). Whereas most scholarship concentrates on single operas, this panel explores the social, economic, and artistic conditions and conventions that underlie a much broader swath of operatic practice in the United States. For every opera that breaks new aesthetic ground (or attempts to), several more conform readily to established musical and dramaturgical conventions.

The opening paper chronicles the NEA’s support of opera in the 1970s, which catalyzed the ensuing renaissance. The early history of the Endowment’s Opera-Musical Theater Program reveals the debates and discourses that were circulating at a national level as American opera coalesced into an art world that remains recognizable in the present. By contrast, the subsequent papers explore contemporary operatic practices from a regional lens, examining how institutions and the people who comprise them shape opera at the levels of genre and convention. The second paper turns to the landscape of contemporary American regional companies and asks how new work is positioned within programming and discourses dominated by a historical canon. The popularity of composers like Heggie and Catán is often used to counter the charge of operatic death, but their works are nonetheless in uneasy dialogue with older repertories. The final paper reframes the programming choices of these regional opera companies by considering the ecosystem of reproduction at the heart of contemporary U.S. opera. By examining the interplay between large-scale institutional convention and the repetitive labor of performers, this paper draws out tensions inherent in contemporary opera’s systems of circulation and (re)performance.

In the late 1970s, a seemingly simple question roiled the National Endowment for the Arts: what is opera? For many American opera practitioners, the NEA’s traditional answer—a predominantly musical art form, inherited from Europe, which synthesized drama, visual arts, and dance—no longer sufficed. NEA contributory experts, including director Hal Prince, impresario David Gockley, and composer Carlisle Floyd, instead argued that opera was “a form unto itself.” In a 1976 proposal to liberate opera from the NEA’s Music Program via the formation of an autonomous Endowment unit, opera representatives made a then-controversial claim: opera “is at least as much theater as it is music.” And in the postwar U.S., it had begun to transform into something new.

The subsequent creation of the Endowment’s Opera-Musical Theater Program (OMT) in 1978 marked a historical watershed for American opera, one that I follow along a documentary trail of memos, meeting minutes, and letters held at the National Archives. Its significance, I argue, was both social and aesthetic (Born 2010, 2011). OMT’s formation reveals that American opera was coalescing into an art world (Becker 1982), as a growing U.S. network of opera companies and service organizations developed collective aims, discourses, and methods. These played out in Endowment debates over the genre, and the reframing of opera as one form of “music theater” among many reflects the internal and external pressures that were shaping the field aesthetically. Reform-minded directors and producers like Frank Corsaro and Sarah Caldwell advocated for opera as theater; musicals by Stephen Sondheim and others edged ever closer to opera.

Amid the NEA’s pivot toward non-institutionalized American artists in the mid-1970s (Uy 2020), the U.S. opera field fortified its cultural position by redefining opera as a capacious, distinctly American, and evolving art form that encompasses multiple genres of music theater. Theory begat praxis, as OMT’s support of “New American Works” catalyzed the following decade’s operatic renaissance (Metcalf 2017). This historical episode ultimately demonstrates the means and mechanisms by which art worlds emerge and transform, as individuals and institutions navigate unsettled networks of activity, aesthetics, and artworks.

One common rejoinder to charges of opera’s death is to point to the prolific and sustained production of new opera in American regional opera houses, particularly the works of composers like Jake Heggie, Daniel Catán, Libby Larsen, Mark Adamo, and Kevin Puts. This repertory, typified by operas like Dead Man Walking and Little Women, has indeed enjoyed a prominent presence in the U.S. as well as Canada, one defined not by breaks with operatic pasts but rather its assimilation of them in the name of canonicity and self-proclaimed accessibility. In this paper, I consider this repertory in the structural context of American regional opera.

First, I will argue that a “new American traditionalism” can be considered a coherent repertory. The musical style, performance histories, promotional strategies, and reception of these works are defined by a tonal and highly melodic musical style; self-proclaimed accessibility (realized with various strategies); regional circulation; and self-conscious historicity. These operas’ musical style and the discourses around them frequently create a narrative of continuity with canonical opera and its lingering cultural prestige. They also promise a typically middlebrow approachability that presumes that their audiences gravitate toward melodic, tonal scores and “relatable” characters.

I then examine two works to consider what they have to say about opera itself. Both Daniel Catán’s Florencia en el Amazonas and Jake Heggie’s Great Scott feature main characters who are divas. Heggie’s work features elaborate parodies of operatic cultures that both question and reify operatic ritual, locating opera’s appeal in its obsessive camp excess but frequently eliding the production mechanisms and labor that go into its creation. As Christopher Weimer has explored, Florencia’s titular diva, on the other hand, rejects opera itself as an overly Eurocentric culture. Yet Florencia the opera has been leveraged by American opera houses as a diversity initiative even as critics have called its score overly derivative of European traditions. In neither work is opera quite dead, nor is it fully alive, but rather suspended in the historicity of its environment.

While the first performance of a new opera is a cause for celebration, often it is the performances in the months and years after the premiere that cement that work’s standing within the repertory. At the same time, the institutional standardization necessary for the successful economic circulation of a new opera or production can limit the creativity of those involved. Scholars have given attention to the role of institutional structures in producing new opera (Metcalf 2017, Ebright 2017) as well as the rise of transnational schools of contemporary opera libretti (Stebbins 2020). To date, however, the relationship between the economic intricacies of production—that is, the institutional details that govern a work’s circulation within the twenty-first century opera industry—and operatic convention has been overlooked.

This paper examines the ways operatic institutions in the United States rely upon generic repetition, rather than creating space for more fluid representations. I argue that the circulation of a production should be considered as yet another of opera’s “systems” (Petrobelli 1994), one with the power to shape many other elements of operatic convention. I compare two categories of “repeat” performance: co-productions and repeat “experimental” performances. The first category, co-productions (Kosky, Andrade, and Barritt’s Die Zauberflöte and Sharon’s The Valkyries), highlights how closed institutional systems standardize performance down to the smallest details of production. By contrast, repeat experimental performances, such as the 2021 Detroit Opera staging of Ragnar Kjartansson’s conceptual opera, Bliss (also directed by Sharon), offer different challenges on levels of reproducibility and thus, scale. The experimental structure of Bliss thematized the notion of repetition itself through twelve hours of performance. Unexpectedly, performers perceived this structure as creatively liberating rather than redundant.

Co-productions conceal the labor of the performer’s repetitive body and experiments like Bliss spectacularize it; both types of performance reveal the tension between experimentation and repetition at the heart of a U.S. operatic enterprise dependent mainly upon the actions of institutional networks. At the same time, identifying such limitations—and connecting them to the conventions of historical operatic performance—offers illuminating possibilities about the means of experimentation within such a system.