Talk on Beyoncé’s Lemonade and ANOHNI’s Hopelessness

The following contributions are cited separately in RILM: John T. HAMILTON, Così fan tutti i compositori: The Cephalus-Procris myth and the birth of romantic opera in Hoffmann’s Aurora (RILM 2013-12919); Julia RANDEL, Un-voicing Orpheus: The powers of music in Stravinsky and Balanchine’s ‘Greek’ ballets (RILM 2013-12920).

Eva Palmer-Sikelianos (1874–1952), along with her husband, the poet Angehlos Sikelianos,
founded the first modern Delphic Festival in 1927 in an effort to revive the Ancient Greek rites that
took place on that spot over 2,500 years before. She invited “overseers of culture” from around
the globe to convene in the holy city of Delphi for a reena…[Read more]

In arguing that underneath the placid, ‘stripped-down’ style of Socrate there lurks a hidden violence, this essay does not focus on Satie’s compositional process, documented in his notebooks; instead, it examines Socrate’s performance history and the creation of the work’s libretto, which the composer completed before sketching his musical ideas.…[Read more]

Sappho’s oeuvre exists in tantalizing fragments providing fodder for generations of interpreters to reimagine her life and poetry in myriad ways. The paper looks at three Parisian fantasies of Sappho: Charles Gounod’s first opera Sapho (1851 and 1884), Charles Cuvillier’s operetta Sapphô (1912), and the Sapphic music and dramatic activities held i…[Read more]

Book review of Reviewed Works: Stravinsky’s “Pulcinella”: A Facsimile of the Sources and Sketches by Maureen A. Carr; The Wendy Hilton Dance & Music Series 12 by Millicent Hodson

An introduction to the analysis and interpretation of European classical music from 1827 to the present. The focus is on music of Europe, in particular of France, Germany, and Italy, but thanks to the vagaries of colonialism and imperialism we will also direct our attention towards countries where the musical traditions of Western Europe spread,…[Read more]

This seminar investigates musical performances of the past in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ranging from Anton Webern’s famous transcription of a Bach fugue to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical Hamilton, we will seek to explore how compositional practices in the twentieth century drew inspiration from a range of historical sources, and…[Read more]

Leonard Bernstein’s 1949 second symphony, subtitled “The Age of Anxiety,” is an exploration of post-war apathy and exhaustion at the dawn of McCarthyism. Examining the work both in its political context and also within the context of Bernstein’s beloved American symphonic tradition, I show how Bernstein flipped the triumphal musical rhetoric of…[Read more]