Conference Agenda

Completed in 1976 but unperformed and unpublished until 2024, Quinary Quixotic Songs stands out among Julia Perry’s final works and remains one of her least examined. Scored for bass-baritone and an unusual chamber ensemble of flute, clarinet, viola, baritone horn, and piano, the five-movement song cycle sets Perry’s own surreal, cryptic texts. Although the title invokes Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the music stages a darker meditation on striving against injustice and human limitation, locating a “quixotic” impulse in sites as varied as an imprisoned poet and the spectacle of a bullfight.

This paper argues that Quinary Quixotic Songs offers unique insight into ongoing historiographic efforts to categorize Perry within neoclassicist, modernist, and postmodernist frameworks. This study engages Tammy Kernodle’s account of the “Black postmodern concert aesthetic” alongside Ryan Dohoney’s notion of “metamodernist drift,” both of which advance historiographic and ideological accounts of Julia Perry’s musical aesthetic. By focusing on one of Perry’s later, most experimental works, this paper extends and recalibrates their insights. Through close analysis, I demonstrate that although Perry deploys postmodern compositional techniques, like fragmentation, irony, and intertextuality, the work does not rupture into a play of surfaces or postmodern detachment. Each song articulates its own musico-structural logic and moves through dramatically different subjects, generating a dizzying heterogeneity. Fragmentation becomes the condition through which structural depth emerges. Beneath this fractured surface persists a fundamentally modernist utopian gesture: an ethical demand for striving.

Quinary Quixotic Songs offers a striking example of how Perry operated within a space of fugitive abstraction, where the work’s opacity unsettles hermeneutic containment yet betrays a distinctly modernist meditation on striving as a necessary, if unrealizable, utopian demand. Given Perry’s eclectic style, this work provides one instance of how Perry’s music resists totalizing narratives of race, gender, and conventional stylistic periodization in twentieth-century American concert music. This analysis thus contributes to the necessary recontextualization of Perry within ongoing historiographic debates demanded by her diverse output and suggests a model for the interpretation of Perry and other Black women composers of her generation.

Cécile Chaminade was a French composer and pianist best known for her character pieces and mélodies. Yet her early oeuvre also included orchestral and symphonic works, such as the Concertstück for piano and orchestra. By the 1890s, however, her output shifted significantly toward shorter, commercially viable piano pieces and songs. Previous scholarship, notably Marcia J. Citron’s monograph, has explained Chaminade’s limited engagement with large-scale genres in financial, aesthetic, or discriminatory terms. While these factors form an important backdrop to her career, they leave room for closer analytical attention to individual large-scale works. I therefore center the Concertstück, a concerted orchestral work through which Chaminade staged her early artistic ambitions, yet one that has received little sustained scholarly analysis. Rather than focusing solely on reception or scale, I examine how Chaminade articulated her ambitions within the composition itself, engaging contemporary aesthetics and culturally coded virtuosity in tension with gendered expectations in nineteenth-century musical discourse.

I argue that the Concertstück synthesizes two modes of compositional and pianistic performance: a compositional ambition articulated through Lisztian piano virtuosity, rich orchestration, and ambiguous formal design aligned with the “progressive” aesthetics of the New Germans, and a highly popular, exoticist, and culturally coded mode of virtuosity in its invocation of the style hongrois. In doing so, Chaminade positions herself both as a composer of large-scale works and as a pianist capable of delivering the expressive intensity associated with the style hongrois. Drawing on Jonathan Bellman’s discussion of the style hongrois and his exploration of nineteenth-century stereotypes of Roma, I show that this idiom carried connotations sharply opposed to the ideals of cultivation, restraint, and refinement that governed women’s musical expression at the time. The reception of the Concertstück was gendered, with a critic describing it as “strong and virile—perhaps too virile,” lamenting the absence of the grace typically associated with her piano works and songs. The charge of virility thus emerges as a response to Chaminade’s aesthetic transgression of prevailing norms of feminine musicianship. This tension had lasting consequences, contributing to her subsequent move away from large-scale works in her compositional output and concert programming.

This paper reexamines the electronic music of Mexican composer Alida Vázquez Ayala (1924–2015) in order to bring lite to her story, as part of the historiographies of postwar experimentalism. Although Vázquez engaged mid-century electronic practices in dialogue with U.S. institutions including the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, and Mexican pioneers of electronic music like Hector Quintanar, her work remains largely absent from canonical accounts of electronic modernism. Drawing on archival research, correspondence, and oral history, this research situates her electronic compositions within transnational circuits of exchange that challenge models of technological innovation. Vázquez approached composition with feminist lenses, and stayed true to her voice and identity, she treated tape and studio media as extensions of compositional concerns rooted in timbre, gesture, and experimentations of form. Her resists narratives that equate electronic music with technological mastery, and invite reconsideration of how modernist value has been constructed—often through institutional affiliation, access to technical infrastructure, and preservation within stable archival systems.

At the same time, Vázquez’s trajectory illuminates the gendered and geopolitical conditions that shaped participation in early electronic music. As a Mexican woman composer working across national contexts, her access to resources, circulation networks, and long-term preservation was uneven. Much of her electronic output survives only fragmentarily, dispersed across personal archives and deteriorating media. Engaging these materials necessitates a methodological shift: one that treats archival fragility not as marginality, but as constitutive of the historical field itself.

By placing Vázquez at the center of analysis, this paper argues for a reconfiguration of electronic modernism that foregrounds migration, pedagogical labor, and informal networks alongside institutional innovation. This in conversation with feminist historiography, and the global re-mapping of twentieth-century experimental music.