David Kendall, “Behold Your Music!”: Music as a Force of Creation, Destruction, and Re-Creation in the Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis
Music plays an important role in the created worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Indeed, it is the power of song that instigates world-creation, both in Tolkien’s Middle Earth and in Lewis’ Narnia. Both authors were surrounded by music throughout their lives, and together with an intimate knowledge of the classics of the ancient world and of Christian theology, their works of fiction are full of the rich musical imagery found in those traditions.
Tolkien’s world features a primordial heaven in which music is not only the force that generates the material world, but where the development of music itself, in its themes, consonances, and dissonances, are determining factors in the history of the world itself. In Middle Earth, the fall from perfection occurs before the physical creation, similar to accounts from the Bible and the early Church Fathers. In the Narnian world of Lewis, music also fashions the material world, in ways similar to those described in John Milton’s Paradise Lost and other contemporary works.
These created worlds also feature music as a force of destruction. In Tolkien’s music of creation, Melkor (analogous to Lucifer) invents his own musical themes that are contrary to and dissonant from those provided by Eru, the creator. These conflicting themes represent future death and decay in Middle Earth. The end of Narnia is heralded by a giant, Father Time, blowing a great ringing note on a horn that causes the stars to fall from the sky, precipitating the destruction of that world.
For Tolkien and Lewis, the return to paradise is likewise a musical event. Middle Earth is re-created through a new theme composed by Eru, and Aslan’s Country (i.e. heaven) in Narnia is a place filled with music. The characters and races populating these worlds are also musically conceived, with some “well-tuned” and others “mis-tuned” or even “un-tuned”. Music provides a rich and varied backdrop for these created worlds, providing foundations on which to more deeply understand and critique these highly significant works of 20th-century fiction.
Herman Hudde, Rewriting, Memory, and Emotion: Is There a Latin American Contemporary Musical Chronicle in Miguel del Águila’s Music?
Latin American literature is entwined with the genre of the chronicle. The Latin American writers who work in the contemporary chronicle genre have begun to refute the representations made by European or Eurocentric chroniclers, so as to rewrite history and contribute to the American continent’s epistemological decolonization. Have some Latin American composers of contemporary art music created a musical chronicle similar to these literary writers? No musicology studies have looked at this transdisciplinary connection. The present work tries to answer that question with the support of Latin American philosophy and literary theory. Some of the works by composer Miguel del Águila (Uruguay, 1957–) use elements like those of contemporary Latin American chronicle writers, such as the rewriting of the past, memory, nostalgia, and the author as the narrative’s character. This article examines three of del Águila’s pieces, TOCCATA op. 28 (1989), RETURN op. 66 (1999), and THE FALL OF CUZCO op. 99 (2009) and demonstrates the parallels between his music and the literature of the contemporary chronicle genre.
Elizabeth Lindau, “Making (Non)sense of Brian Eno’s Lyrics”
Brian Eno released four major-label solo rock albums beginning with his debut Here Come the Warm Jets in 1974 and ending with Before and After Science in 1977. He reluctantly served as lyricist and lead vocalist on all of them, before abdicating these roles and turning to instrumentals with the ambient Music for Airports series. In interviews and writings, Eno has expressed discomfort with song lyrics and the personae behind them: “They always impose something that is so unmysterious compared to the sound of the music [that] they debase the music for me” (quoted in Tamm 1995). To circumvent language’s denotative nature, Eno employed what poet and literary critic Susan Stewart called “nonsense operations”: absurd phrases, simultaneity, reversal, inversion, and phonetic poetry. Many of these procedures were pioneered by literary figures in the interwar historical avant-garde movements of dada and surrealism. Like many British rockers of his generation, Eno had formative encounters with avant-gardism as a student in the British Art School system (Frith and Horne 1987). He makes specific reference to figures like Hugo Ball and Kurt Schwitters in writings, interviews, and even song lyrics themselves.
This presentation considers Eno as a resistant rock lyricist who used avant-garde literary gestures to thwart the expressive conventions of popular songwriting. I survey examples of nonsense lyrics and vocalise from Eno’s 1970s solo rock releases, and in his contributions to albums by David Bowie, Cluster, Phil Manzanera, and the Talking Heads. Eno is far from the first popular musician to employ nonsense in his work—indeed, whole styles like doo-wop and scat singing are predicated on it. But Eno’s studious attempts to avoid clear lyrical meaning are remarkable, especially given his reputation for treatises and lecture tours. His attitudes toward verbal expression in song developed during a period when “poetry of rock” anthologies (e.g., Goldstein 1969) attempted to elevate and legitimate the rock lyric. Eno’s ambivalence is in keeping with widespread mistrust of lyrical analysis in rock criticism and scholarship (Griffiths 2003). Like his avant-garde predecessors, Eno attempts to subvert language and make it resemble musical sound.
Kenneth Marcus, Composing about Concentration Camps: The Case of Hanns Eisler’s German Symphony
In considering why Nazi Germany utterly failed to uphold even minimal standards in the treatment of its most vulnerable citizens during the 1930s and 40s, a study of Austrian composer Hanns Eisler’s German Symphony (Deutsche Sinfonie, 1935-58) can help us understand how European composers responded to the atrocities of WWII concentration camps. Although there is much work on composers who died in concentration camps (such as Viktor Ullmann, Erwin Schulhoff, and Gideon Klein), and composers who wrote postwar works on the Holocaust (such as Eric Zeisl, Arnold Schoenberg, and Paul Dessau), relatively few composers of whom I am aware were writing music about the camps at the time the concentration camps were in operation in the 1930s and 40s. The objectives of this paper are to examine why Eisler created this work and to contextualize the reception it received at its German premiere on 24 April 1959.
The twelve-tone, eleven-movement German Symphony is a collage of music and text, drawing on poems by Bertolt Brecht, Ignazio Silone and Julius Bittner. Above all it is a work of exile; Eisler wrote almost the entire symphony in three different countries: the United States (1935), England (1936), Denmark (1937) and again the United States (1938-47). Almost complete at the time of his forced departure from the U.S. based on HUAC charges, Eisler wrote the eleventh and final movement in the DDR only in 1958 (on a poem by Brecht) in time for its first performance at the German State Opera in East Berlin, although it has been only rarely performed since then (it was formally recorded in 1987, two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall). Highlighting such classic Brechtian poems as “To the Fighters in the Concentration Camps” and “Remembrance/Potsdam,” among others, the German Symphony addresses such universal issues as gross violations of human rights, the plight of prisoners-of-war, and calls for class unity. As a cultural historian, I will place this interdisciplinary analysis in historical context, thus drawing on the work of both musicologists and historians.
Edmund Mendelssohn, Deconstructing the West: Andre Schaeffner’s Origin
“The source of music is in the human body.” With this claim, Andre Schaeffner (1895-1980) sought a new narrative of musical origin. A lover of jazz, a student of Marcel Mauss, and a participant in the Mission Dakar-Djibouti (1931-33), Schaeffner assembled a vast collection of non-European instruments for Paris’s Musée de l’Homme. He listened to feet stomping on the African soil and the rustling clothes of dancers, claiming that these original sounds inspired the first drums; soon came rattles and bells; then strings made from the veins of plant leaves and horns made from shells. Attending to the materiality of these instruments, Schaeffner challenged Euro-grapho-centric narratives according to which music progressed from monophonic song to the symphony. Further, by describing the “phonetic nuances” of nonwestern speech, Schaeffner presaged the Derridean notion of the “archi-trace” by claiming that the voice, long positioned as the origin of musical utterance in the west, was far from a disembodied ideal: the voice is always already material. Instrumental and vocal sounds, for Schaeffner, derive not from metaphysical ideals, but from fundamental material forms—the bow, the pipe, the phonetic breath.
This paper will demonstrate that Schaeffner’s writings of the 1930s prefigured the deconstruction of the category of “the West” that would feature in later works by major French intellectuals. James Clifford once suggested that ethnologists and surrealists of France’s interwar years, fascinated by collections of non-European artifacts, came to view western culture as an arbitrary assemblage of signs. This “ethnographic surrealist” attitude heralded the semiotic and deconstructive views of cultural order in vogue by Derrida’s day. I suggest that music, and specifically Schaeffner’s organology, was always a central part of this French lineage, and I show that a central thread joins Schaeffner with Derrida: the critique of ontology. I contend that Schaeffner’s beliefs about vocal and musical materiality foreshadowed Derrida’s assertion that western “Being” is a white mythology, a myth bolstering the metaphysical authority of “the West.” From our perspective, Schaeffner is therefore a crucial figure in the pre-history of musical ontology, and attending to him may bring our own deeply-held ontological convictions into question.
Hannah Neuhauser, In the Shadows of Jazz: The Crucial Role of Classical Music in Film Noir
In spite of the vast expansion of research regarding film noir as a genre and its archetypes, there is little that discusses the importance of the score in film noir. Film noir has been influenced so heavily by Hollywood’s change to modern scoring, that there are few musical techniques associated with the genre outside of wavering sonorities and the use of non-standard instruments, such as the Theremin (Hickman, 2009). The most notable work that has discussed music in film noir would be Robert Miklitish’s Siren City: Sound and Score in Classic American Noir (2011). Miklitish deeply analyzes the prevalent source music, such as siren songs sung by the femme fatale or the significance of popular music from jukeboxes or record players in the background. Popular music, particularly jazz, has become synonymous with the genre, albeit controversially (Butler, 2002). However, the iconic pairing of jazz noir overshadows the weight of classical music.
Despite the presence of classical music within several noir films, a lack of study remains about its importance towards shaping critical elements of the genre. In my research, classical music is utilized as source music in film noir with three common functions: to create a division of class inside the urban environment; to indicate a character’s former life free from corruption; and lastly, to foreshadow plot. This paper will discuss each function with a film example, Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944) and Hangover Square (John Brahm, 1945) to name a few, in hopes to encourage scholars to recognize the impact of classical music in noir.
Jonathan Spatola-Knoll, Music as Gendered Representation: Understanding Carl Maria von Weber’s Paired Missae Sanctae (1818-19) as Pendant Portraits
In comparing his two mature mass settings, Carl Maria von Weber wrote to a friend: “The first one is the man, this second one the woman.” Indeed, these Missae Sanctae musically form a complementary pair, much as their respective dedicatees, King Friedrich August I and Queen Amalia Augusta of Saxony, constituted a married couple.
The divergent emotional, theological, and aesthetic perspectives of these masses enable them together to form an “expressive double.” Lawrence Kramer defined this type of aesthetic pairing, popular by 1800, as “a form of repetition in which alternative versions of the same pattern define a cardinal difference in perspective” (1990). Though Knapp (2000) and Reynolds (2012) have considered the expressive potential of paired works of this type by Beethoven and Brahms, no existing scholarship has theorized how such a pair may musically analogize a gender binary. I propose that Weber’s two masses replicate the kind of relationship that has long been expressed by pairs of marriage pendant portraits, a genre that has interested artists ranging from Rembrandt to Weber’s German contemporary Jakob Christian Schlotterbeck. These complementary paintings typically depict a man and woman facing each other and embody contrasting and normative gender stereotypes (Retford, 2006). Further, I will propose that Weber’s masses embody idealized gendered traits, demonstrating the ways in which they personify sublime and beautiful virtues that Burke, Kant, and others conventionally associated with masculinity and femininity, respectively. Though scholars like Day (1996) and Scott (2003) have commented on the gendered implications of the sublime and the beautiful, these categories are rarely applied to gendered musical analysis. By analyzing Weber’s masses as a contrastive pair in dialogue with one another, I will explore the philosophical implications of musical style as an expression of Gender.
Elizabeth Campbell, The Colored American Opera Company and Black Churches in Late-Nineteenth-Century Washington D.C.
For the Black community of late-nineteenth-century Washington D.C., classical music was a tool of resistance and community building. Scholars Naomi André and Kira Thurman have recently explored Black musicians’ deep engagement with classical music, resulting in communities that André calls the “Shadow Culture,” and in which Thurman detects the potential to liberate classical music from whiteness. This paper will delve into the music of Washington D.C.’s middle- and upper-class Black churches to highlight the agency, cultural, and artistic importance of Black classical musicians.
In the 1870s and 80s, choirs from five socially prominent Black churches frequently performed elaborate sacred vocal works, including Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass and Rossini’s Stabat Mater. At St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, music was taken so seriously that a highly publicized aesthetic, religious, and social conflict over the program for the Easter service in 1880 resulted in the choir refusing to perform on the most important holiday of the year. Clearly classical music helped cement a community identity beyond seeking financial or social recognition from white society. The singers from these church choirs often worked together to provide practical support to their communities. In 1873, to fund a building project, singers from St. Augustine Catholic Church founded the Colored American Opera Company and performed an operetta by German-born American composer Julius Eichberg, The Doctor of Alcantara. At St. Luke’s in 1879, singers from the “Colored Aristocracy” rendered H.M.S. Pinafore a tale of empire, the British class system, and the imposition of whiteness throughout the world, all of which complicate racial uplift ideologies. Indeed, outsiders often viewed these concerts through the patronizing lens of racial “improvement” even as they financially sustained Black community centers. Investigating this community affords an opportunity to challenge the intertwining of whiteness and classical music while developing a clearer account of the nation’s musical history.
Hesam Abedini, A Post-Intercultural Path: As wide as Iranian music, Jazz, and Western contemporary music
A musical work that includes qualities and elements of two or more musical cultures may be described by terms such as cross-cultural, world, intercultural, and multicultural. Among these terms, ‘cross-cultural’ and ‘intercultural’ seem to be more popular within academia. Compared to the term ‘world music’, which has been used for commercializing merchandised musical works, cross-cultural and intercultural carry more academic gravitas and also include the word ‘culture’ that is essential to the field. While in the past several decades many musicians have moved towards intercultural practices, in many cases it can turn to an unbalanced space where one musical culture appears as an exotic element within a dominant musical culture. I suggest taking a “post Inter-Cultural” path, which can be divided into “post-inter” and “post-cultural”. In a “post-inter” path, combining two musical cultures is neither the motivation nor the intention of a composer, but an organic personal quality based on the composer’s experiences. The “post-cultural” path suggests that, while various musical cultures—which include different musical traditions—exist, in the process of a creative work culture is indeed a very personal concept. This presentation will be focused on introducing the idea of a post-Inter-Cultural path while examining music by Iranian and Iranian-American composers whose works combine Iranian music, Jazz, and Western contemporary music. Besides the author’s compositions, “Music for Tar and Piano” by Milad Mohammadi and Hooshyar Khayam, and “Calligraphy No. 1” for string quartet composed by Reza Vali, are the two works that I discuss as moving along a post-Inter-Cultural path.