AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

122 saturday morning AMS Philadelphia 2009
imitations of and suspensions against the melodies, generate textures and harmonies that
sound less folksy than urbane, and somewhat archaic by late eighteenth-century standards.
Haydn’s choice has provoked controversy. Scholars of Scottish music accuse him of distorting
folk melodies with inappropriate ornamentation and classical harmony, while Haydn specialists
praise his sympathy for the “spirit” of the tunes and their often “non-classical” structure.
My paper argues that Haydn’s fidelity to his sources is less significant than the politically
fraught tension his accompaniments express, a tension between national distinctiveness
and imperial cosmopolitanism that characterizes many eighteenth-century representations
of Scotland. As literary historians have emphasized, following the 1707 Act of Union with
England Scottish intellectuals strove at once to preserve a sense of national identity and to
capitalize on their newfound access to British imperial markets (Leith Davis, Steve Newman,
Katie Trumpener). Matthew Gelbart and others have shown that song collections played an
important role in this two-edged project, producing a heroic-pastoral image of Scotland that
could be sold in England and beyond as well as at home. The mixed goals of the collections are
evident in the song texts, which are rarely traditional lyrics but rather revisions or entirely new
texts by Scottish poets including Robert Burns. They adjust Scots dialect and subject matter
to suit contemporary, English-speaking tastes.
Likewise in the music, many of the tunes set by Haydn had been altered or newly composed
within the preceding few decades. His accompaniments in effect continue the process of reinvention,
assimilating “folk” characteristics such as plagal cadences and “dual tonics” (e.g.,
scale degrees 1 and 6 in major modes) into what is otherwise an unmistakable, if somewhat
outdated style of “art music.” As his publishers undoubtedly hoped, the musical adaptation
reinforces the artful rewriting of the song texts. Clothing the melodies in a sophisticated, historically
resonant musical style remakes them into the kind of venerable high-art legacy the
Scottish intelligentsia wanted to claim for the nation, especially after Samuel Johnson’s Journey
to the Western isles of Scotland (1775) declared that Scotland had no culture worth preserving.
At the same time, the international familiarity of Haydn’s textural and harmonic language deemphasizes
the songs’ “Scottishness,” rendering them suitable for any salon or musical society
that cultivated English-language keyboard song. In that sense the accompaniments stage the
artistic and economic integration of Scottish culture into a broader, “British” identity.
ORCHESTRAL REVOLUTIONS: HAYDN’S LEGACY
AND THE HISTORY OF EFFECT
Emily I. Dolan
University of Pennsylvania
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Haydn was the most famous composer in
Europe; he was praised in verse and awarded medals. By the end of the century, by contrast,
he had transformed into an affable father figure, an innocuous musical prankster who was
respected from a distance; his relevance waned and performances of his works became less
frequent. In being marked as the father of the symphony, Haydn became a mere precursor
to Mozart and Beethoven, unable to transcend history. Scholars have explored the historical
circumstances, myths, and assumptions that allowed Haydn to slip into irrelevance. For Leon
Botstein and others, the overwhelming reason for Haydn’s waning popularity in the nineteenth
century was the demise of what he dubbed “philosophical listening.” Botstein argues
that Haydn’s music contributed to the “philosophical quest for a true, valid and therefore