Author: Kurth, Richard Publication details: Presented at the Research Colloquia Spring 2016, Department of Music, University of Hong Kong, Lung Fu Shan, Hong Kong. 6 April 2016.
Abstract: György Kurtág’s many vocal compositions reflect his discerning and uniquely responsive literary sensibility. He extracts fragments that reveal aphoristic geometries of vivid imagery, conceptual juxtaposition, and intensified diction. He prefers language that activates every dimension of vocality, so that the physicality of singing unleashes fundamental energies that his music can sculpt and magnify. The vocal contours galvanize the contrasts and nuances generated by alliteration and assonance. Kurtág creates music of exceptional linguistic performativity that amplifies the images, concepts, and associations evoked and liberated by the aphoristic fragment.
To explore Kurtág’s approach to performative vocality, this discussion will focus on a work of the early 1980s, the Attila József Fragments for Soprano Solo (Op. 20), Kurtág’s only work for unaccompanied voice. It will examine how Kurtág’s approach to the voice amplifies the literary and sonic dimensions of the texts. And it will also explore how Kurtág generates multiple trajectories and continuities across a diverse field of fragmentary utterances and literary and musical associations, and multivalent form to the unfolding sequence of twenty fragments. The work will also be interpreted as a compassionate dual portrait of the poet József and his mother, in which the solo soprano voice signifies the lost maternal figure as a constant presence in the psyche of the grieving and troubled son.
Artists: Paolo Bortolussiflute, Keith Hamel & John Oliver electronics Recording details: Redshift Records, 2016 Works: Keith Hamel Krishna’s Flute
Larry Lake Israfel John Oliver (BMus’82) Birds of Paradise Lost
Kaija Saariaho NoaNoa Link
Composer: Stephen Chatman Ensembles: Verdehr Duo and Las Cruces Symphony, Lonnie Klein conductor Performers: Walter Verdehr violin, Elsa Ludewig-Verdehr clarinet Recording details: Crystal Records, 2016 Work:Concerto for Clarinet, Violin and Orchestra
Publication details:Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers: Concert Music from 1960-2000, edited by Laurel Parsons, and Brenda Ravenscroft, 156-175. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Oxford Scholarship Online, 2016.
Abstract: Kaija Saariaho’s From the Grammar of Dreams, for two solo female singers, elegantly articulates the poetic structure of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Paralytic” by variations of rhythmic density and register; changes of pitch, intervals, and rhythmic behavior; and an arch-shaped tessitura. Its most striking feature, though, is its “polyvocality,” in which the voices simultaneously sing the same words to very different rhythms and pitches. This essay examines the multiple senses of musical time and space created by the shifting metrical and tonal relationships between the voices. As they imitate, synchronize, and diverge, two distinct concurrent points of reference—two equally present tonalities, and the coexistence of multiple meters—emerge that artfully portray the poem’s symbolic superposition of life and death.
Publication details:Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the 21st Century, edited by Catherine M. Soussloff, 79-102. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016.
Abstract: Traditional post-secondary aural-skills curricula can create extreme difficulties for music majors with dyslexia. This article places the author’s experience teaching these students into the context of contemporary scientific and educational research on dyslexia, including a potential subtype of dyslexia that may impact the reading of musical notation while reading of text is unaffected. From the standpoint of a social model of disability, the existence of dyslexia is contested. However, new models of dyslexia frame it not as a disability but a byproduct of superior cognitive strengths in forms of reasoning hitherto undervalued in traditional education. Identifying and building on these strengths in students with dyslexia may aid instructors in designing effective pedagogical strategies that help these students improve in typical aural-skills tasks. Such strategies may be equally beneficial for all students.
Working closely with dyslexic students and others who struggle with traditional aural-skills tasks leads to more fundamental questions about the assumptions and values implicit in standard aural-skills curricula. The principles of Universal Design for Learning may facilitate the design of courses that allow all students to grow in response to challenges by recognizing and recruiting their individual cognitive strengths.
Abstract: Nietzsche points out in The Birth of Tragedy (1872, rev. 1886) that modern Dionysiac music began with Beethoven’s symphonic music and matured in Wagner’s music drama. Yet his account fails to explain a convention of Bacchus in pre-nineteenth-century music. This chapter provides a corrective by explaining the relationships among music, Bacchus, and freedom in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French music. With the use of Euripides’s Bacchae, the section “Bacchus and Pentheus” in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Nietzsche’s essay “The Dionysian World View,” this article relates the themes of musical deviance and political defiance, liberation and destruction, and orgy and regeneration to the ideas of positive and negative freedoms as well as freedom of action and freedom of motion. This article thus contextualizes d’Alembert’s De la liberté de la musique of 1759 by arguing that representations of Bacchus enable music and the body to construct freedom as an embodied concept.
