AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

146 saturday afternoon AMS Philadelphia 2009
And these convictions heavily shaped editorial choices in their many antiphonaries and graduals.
Above all, we can observe in their transcriptions a concerted effort to avoid the use of
raised leading tones, melodic periodicity, triadic contours and other markers that might suggest
the insidious contamination of tonalité moderne.
We find much the same philosophy guiding the jurist Edmond de Coussemaker in his
transcriptions of fourteenth-century polyphony drawn from the recently uncovered Montpellier
Codex. Coussemaker was reluctant to impose musica ficta with anything but the lightest
touch lest it corrupt the modal delicacy of this music through an over-saturation of appellative
leading tones. Still, it was telling that the Montpellier manuscript also included several
trouvère melodies and secular pieces that Coussemaker acknowledged as unimpeachable harbingers
of the tonal spirit.
iMAginAry lAnDscAPes
richard leppert, university of Minnesota, chair
IMAGINING THE LISTENER THROUGH AMERICAN
EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC: NPR’S rAdioViSioNS
Louise Chernosky
Columbia University
In the 1980s, National Public Radio (NPR) supported experimental music through programming
that both consolidated a tradition and commissioned new works. radioVisions,
broadcast nationally, was the first major series on NPR designed to introduce listeners to
new music. (radioVisions was produced by Steve Rathe, Real Art Ways and NPR member
stations WGBH-FM/Boston in association with NPR, Connecticut Public Radio, and NPR
member stations WFCR-FM/Amherst and WNYC-FM/New York.) It presented an impressive
pageant of music by over fifty American composers, including Laurie Anderson, Leonard
Bernstein, Anthony Braxton, John Cage, Aaron Copland, Ornette Coleman, Henry Cowell,
Peter Gordon, Lou Harrison, Joan La Barbara, Conlon Nancarrow, Steve Reich, and Virgil
Thomson. Composer/conductor Gunther Schuller acted as host for each of the fourteen,
hour-long programs, and helped listeners draw connections between broadcasts. radioVisions
was celebrated in the New york times as “the first important broadcast vehicle to focus on new
music—new American music, specifically.” The show defined “new American music” primarily
as “American experimental music.”
This paper examines the American experimentalism of radioVisions within the context of
the relationship between public radio and its listeners. I concentrate first on the construction
of experimentalism that can be heard in radioVisions. Through its didactic introductory
segments, composers’ self-portraits, and the show’s rejection of “academic” composers, the
series characterized experimental music as non-European, innovative, eclectic, populist, and
Cageian. Yet this characterization did not always hold sway: an expanded notion of experimentalism
could be heard in radioVisions’s coverage of musical activities in Cincinnati and
Pittsburgh (cities typically ignored in favor of New York’s downtown); its presentation of
more accessible, traditional orchestral music; and its feature on experimental “jazz and creative
music.” I demonstrate how radioVisions’s experimentalism was related to a discursive
construction of public radio listeners. This is most evident in a broadcast called “The Chal-