Abstracts - American Musicological Society

44 Thursday Afternoon: Session 1- 37
AMS/SEM/SMT New Orleans 2012
dance, might think critically, too, about the various ways in which dancers have envisioned and embodied the audio-visual
relation.
My paper chips away at these issues with reference to a style of dance, dating from the turn of the twentieth century, known
nowadays as “early modern.” The category embraces a cluster of dance practitioners who rejected the conventions of classical
ballet—costuming, décor, the alternation of mime and pointe-work—in favour of a more spontaneous brand of bodily expression.
To the early moderns, dance was a means of projecting the individual impulse to movement. Moreover, it was closely
bound to music, especially nineteenth-century instrumental music, seemingly ripe for stage representation.
Focusing on Loie Fuller, Valentine de Saint-Point and the lesser-known Jean d’Udine, this paper documents dancers’
musical ambitions, detailed in primary sources (newspapers, specialist journals and autobiographical writings), yet largely
overlooked in the secondary literature. I explore how modes of musical representation were rooted in contemporary ideology,
from the biomechanics of perigenesis (evolution by means of protoplasmic replication) to Futurist theories of l’art cérébriste.
More than this, I demonstrate how the dancers’ thoughts on music bring valuable insights to bear on the aesthetic debates and
representational conundrums of Euro-American modernism. Suggesting more than a simple shift from representational art to
abstraction, the dancers bring to critical discourse an “ideal union” of the arts, unseating established notions of authorship and
mimesis, and articulating a prototypically modernist dilemma—what it means to represent at a particular historical moment.
“Tonight I am Playing Madrigals from a Distant Country”:
Interwar Japanese Musical Modernism and Settings of Fukao Sumako’s Poetry
Kathryn Etheridge (Florida State University)
Although “modernism” has been understood first and foremost as a Euro-American, multi-faceted aesthetic movement,
modernism has also been conceptualized by Japanese and Western scholars alike as a historical and artistic epoch in Japan
beginning in the early twentieth century. The products of interwar Japanese modernists—those who were active during the
Taishō era (1912–26) and the first decade of the Shōwa era (1926–89)—have often been dismissed as vacant copies of Western
artistic styles. Yet while Japanese artists drew heavily upon Western arts, they were also dealing with, and writing about,
modernist aesthetic issues at the same time that Western artists were grappling with parallel issues, including internationalism,
fragmentation, a substantial break from tradition, and a search for the artistic “new.” Japanese modernism should be
viewed not simply as a phenomenon motivated by the influence or imitation of Western artistic movements; interwar artists
transformed Western contemporary values and methods as they actively responded to developments within Japanese modernity.
Evidence of interwar Japanese modernism can be found most especially in painting and literature, two fields which
have received much scholarly attention in recent decades. Japanese music from this period has not yet acquired comparable
consideration; however, interwar Japanese composers of yōgaku (art music in a Western style) expressed values similar to their
visual and literary counterparts.
Interwar Japanese modernism provides the conceptual framework for my examination of yōgaku compositions by Hashimoto
Qunihico (1904–49) and Sugawara Meirō (1897–1988). Both composers set the poetry of Fukao Sumako, including her
poem Fue fuki me (“Woman Piper”) from her anthology Mendori no shiya, announced in the Japanese journal Kaizō in April
1928 immediately after she returned from her first trip to Europe. These settings reflect modernist values in different ways, as
does the international network that formed between Fukao and various Japanese and European musicians during the 1920s
and 1930s. In my paper I discuss how this musicultural complex informs interwar Japanese modernism, providing a new perspective
to the growing body of scholarship on Japanese modernism that brings music to the forefront.
“I hear those voices that will not be drowned”: Sentimentality under Erasure in Peter Grimes
Christopher Chowrimootoo (Harvard University)
Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes (1945) embodies a paradox: it is at once a testament to its composer’s popularity and a symbol
of his neglect. While few could ignore the critical acclaim that the opera received following its now-legendary premiere,
commentators have often exaggerated dissent as a way of defending the work from its own success. Even after the opera had
been widely applauded by press and public alike, one critic continued to predict: “Peter Grimes will shock the fashionable
first-nighters. The music is merciless, arrogant, tempestuous and makes no concession to the ear.” By imagining philistine opposition
to Britten’s opera and focusing on its more challenging moments, commentators have been able to stylize the work as
a “difficult,” modernist opera, which offers timely, even existential, meditations on postwar alienation.
Through an investigation of the relationship between the work and its reception, I examine how Peter Grimes has invited
precisely the kinds of selective responses it has resisted. I suggest that, in playing with themes of artistic alienation and “checking
itself on the verge of melody,” the opera allowed audiences to imagine themselves as champions of a difficult and innovative
artwork. I also explore how such images have been consistently thwarted by traces of sentimentality in the opera’s narrative
and music.