AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

70 Friday morning AMS Philadelphia 2009
is more than capable in taming the unruly horse. The dialogic relationship between the two
songs placed Montana in a subject position usually inhabited by the heroic cowboy.
In addition to their engagement with folk music, Autry’s and Montana’s inclusion of the
characteristics of 1930s Tin Pan Alley songs, melodic chromaticisms supported by secondary
dominants, enabled the cowboy and cowgirl to depict the West in middle-class metaphors of
romance and longing. In particular, Autry’s “Dear Old Western Skies” (1933) continued to
map nostalgic sensibility onto the West, while Montana’s “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart”
(1935) drew from diverse musical sources, cowboy tunes and popular music, to portray
a female subject in the symbolic freedoms of frontier culture. The musical imagery of the
autonomous cowgirl next to the morally upright cowboy occurred during an era of economic
hardship, where women entered the workforce and men struggled to maintain their jobs.
Drawing upon cowboy ballads and the trends of popular culture, Montana’s and Autry’s repertory
attempted to assuage the gendered and class anxieties of the Great Depression. By
situating their rural personas in the romantic myths of the West, they idealized the tensions
surrounding gender roles of the 1930s.
trAcing the PAth
James currie, university at Buffalo, chair
SCHUBERT, SEIDL, AND THE THREAT OF FINITUDE
Blake Howe
Graduate Center, CUNY
Of Schubert’s fifteen settings of the poetry of Johann Gabriel Seidl, his eleven solo lieder
have been well examined in the scholarly literature, several (particularly “Die Taubenpost”)
securing a firm position in the concert repertoire. The remaining four part songs for male
quartet, however, are largely unstudied and offer an opportunity to enrich our understanding
of how Schubert confronted Seidl’s poetry in the process of song composition. Three of
these Seidl part songs engage with an aesthetic altogether different from what is found in the
more quaint poetry of the solo lieder. These partsongs—“Widerspruch,” for male quartet
and piano; “Grab und Mond,” for male quartet, a cappella; and “Nachthelle,” for tenor solo,
male quartet, and piano—weigh issues of considerable heft: death, eternity, boundedness,
emergence. In “Widerspruch,” the poet’s heart “strives for infinity” (though this soon proves
terrifying); in the somber “Grab und Mond,” the poet asks “whether darkness or light lives
in the grave”; and in “Nachthelle,” the “rich light” within the poet’s heart bursts through its
corporeal container: “It wants out, it must out— / The last barrier breaks.” Seidl’s spatial
metaphors—the in/out, centripetal/centrifugal dialectic, operating within “boundary” and
“rupture” schemas—illustrate the central questions (left unresolved) with which the poet is
here engaged: is death an encasement or an emergence? Is infinity something to be embraced
or something to be feared?
Schubert’s settings of both “Grab und Mond” and “Nachthelle” date from September 1826,
and while it is impossible to date “Widerspruch” with any certainty (the terminus ante quem
is the date of its publication, November 1828), the part song may very well have been composed
around this time. In engaging with the aesthetics of emergence in these three partsongs,
Schubert uses shifts between chromatic mediants—the flatted submediant and the major