Cracking the Code: What Notation Can Tell Us About Our Musical Values

Abstract: This essay presents a history of dominant Western notational systems in order to discover what aspects of music notation privileges and why. It then focuses on graphic notation in the 20th century to see how and why composers stretched and modified notations, how performers have responded to those changes, and what we learn about music through the process.

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Listening to Music History

Abstract: This essay argues that recordings have changed the ways that musicians construct music and the ways that listeners perceive it. Because of the ubiquity of recorded music, the assumptions that we make about “music history” are often at odds with the ways that we experience music’s history through recordings. Using the perspectives inspired by recordings and their distribution, this essay provides alternative methods for thinking about, organizing, or “listening to” music history.

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Jenny Lind and the Making of Mainstream American Popular Music

Abstract: This essay about Jenny Lind’s mid-nineteenth-century American concert tour is a case study for these ways of thinking about musics embedded in culture and the legacy of historical musical-cultural processes. Lind’s status as “ideal” grew from the cultural discourse about her singing voice as gendered, raced and classed. These aspects of identity help us gain a more complete picture of Jenny Lind’s embeddedness in mid-nineteenth century American culture, as well as her appeal as a musical celebrity.

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MacDowell’s Vanishing Indians

Abstract: This essay examines Edward Macdowell’s borrowing of Native American music in two piano miniatures, “Indian Idyl” from New England Idyls and “From an Indian Lodge” from Woodland Sketches. The composer’s passive treatment of the Native American subject aligns with a cultural shift at the turn-of-the-century, what historians call the “vanishing Indian.” With the violent defeat of Native American resistance at Wounded Knee and the assimilation of tribes under the Dawes Act, Native Americans became reimagined as historical figures that simply “vanished” long ago, and thus became nationalist symbols for an industrializing nation. Through close analysis, this essay suggests how MacDowell’s music was part of a broader cultural embrace of the “vanishing Indian.

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Instrumental Music in Early Seventeenth-Century Italy: Instruments as Vehicles of Discovery

Abstract: Early seventeenth-century Italy saw the rise of the first substantial body of publications of independent, idiomatic instrumental music. Composers embraced a rhetoric of invention and virtuosic rhapsody, creating new genres, styles, and forms. Taking account of developments in the history of science and the other arts, this essay shows that the emergence of this instrumental repertoire may be understood as a manifestation of a new conception of instruments of all sorts—scientific, artistic, musical, mechanical.

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An Intermedia Approach to Seventeenth-Century English Popular Song Culture

Abstract: This essay sets forth examples for multidisciplinary approaches to seventeenth-century English popular song and its presentations across media by tracing the contextual histories of popular tunes. Historical musicology and literary studies have given priority to notated works written by composers or authors supported by powerful institutions like the church, aristocratic patrons, or the crown. Yet, to truly understand English musical culture means engaging with not only canonical behemoths like the dramatic works of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the poetry of John Milton, the Italian operas of G. F. Handel, John Dowland’s lute music, the English virginal school, and ballad opera, but also how these works draw on popular songs circulating in London’s theaters, streets, and homes. Seventeenth-century English popular music and its transmission, reception, and preservation defy the notion of discrete categories of elite and popular, oral and written, high and low, public and private. Our methodologies for studying it should acknowledge this circulation and transformation.

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Ancient Mesopotamian Music, the Politics of Reconstruction, and Extreme Early Music

Abstract: This essay explores the power and connections between performed and material reconstructions of “extreme” early music. Drawing on recent scholarship in archaeological preservation and conservation as well as performance studies, Dorf contextualizes and analyzes the music of singer/songwriter Stef Conner’s setting of the Gilgamesh narrative. The multiple reconstructions of Eastern Mediterranean culture discussed here not only provide a setting to test the limits of musical reconstructions, refabrications and reinventions, but also demonstrate ways musical reconstructions function as a form of history for general audiences. Such public performances sidestep scholarly questions of authenticity and allow us to see how, when, and to whom scholarship becomes “real.”

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