Annual Meetings

2015 Annual Meeting Activities

LIGHTNING PAPERS

  • Timothy Chenette (Utah State University), What Can We Learn About Ars Subtilior Temporality from Mala Punica’s Performances?
  • Andrew M. Friedman (Harvard University), Performance Analyzing Analysis
  • Charise Hastings (Tallahassee, FL), Performers’ Analyses: Collating, Integrating, Assimilating
  • Peter Kaminsky (University of Connecticut), A Tale of Two Recordings and Their Analytical Ramifications: Jane Bathori, Pierre Bernac, and Debussy’s “Colloque sentimental” (NB: see published version in MTO 22.3)

2014 Annual Meeting Activities

PERFORMANCE AND ANALYSIS TODAY: NEW HORIZONS

(NB: See published proceedings in MTO 22.2)

PANELISTS

  • Benjamin Binder (Duquesne University): “Art and Science, Beauty and Truth, Performance and Analysis?”
  • Elisabeth Le Guin (UCLA): “Dividing in Order to Conquer: Early Baroque Division Treatises, Pedagogy, and the Concept of Mastery”
  • Daphne Leong (University of Colorado): “Analysis and Performance, or, Wissen, Können, Kennen“
  • Peter Martens (Texas Tech University): “Ways of Knowing the Body, Bodily Ways of Knowing”
  • Fabio Morabito (Kings College London): “The Private Library of a Famous Nineteenth-Century Ensemble: Looking at Traces of the Interpretative Process as a Form of Analysis?”
  • Roger Moseley (Cornell University): “High Scores: Analyzing Performance as Musical Play”

RESPONDENTS:

  • John Rink (University of Cambridge)
  • Janet Schmalfeldt (Tufts University)

MODERATORS (and PAIG co-chairs):

  • Daniel Barolsky (Beloit College)
  • Edward Klorman (Queens College, CUNY; and The Juilliard School)

2013 Annual Meeting Activities

This meeting included a comparative listening and discussion of recorded performances of Debussy’s Syrinx for solo flute, led by Daniel Barolsky and David Kopp.

2012 Annual Meeting Activities

This meeting included a presentation on a new publication, conference reports, and the main event, an open discussion focusing on music of Scriabin. Various materials that were discussed at this meeting–including texts, the score of a Scriabin prelude, and recordings–may be found on the PAIG Supplemental Material for 2012 Meeting page.

  • Matthew Bribitzer-Stull spoke on his forthcoming Anthology for Analysis and Performance (Oxford). There was a brief period for questions and discussion. The foreword and table of contents for the anthology were available for download as a PDF on the Supplemental Material page.
  • There were be reports on two conferences in England held under the auspices of CMPCP, the Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice. The first conference, “Music & Shape,” took place the previous summer in London. The second was one of a series of Performance Studies Network conferences at Cambridge. Various URL links for last summer’s conference were available on the Supplemental Material page.
  • Daniel Barolsky moderated an open discussion on a short, intriguing piano piece, Scriabin’s prelude op. 11 no. 2, from the dual perspectives of analyzing the score and recorded performances. Preparatory materials for this discussion–a score; five recordings by a select group of pianists; and a brief Word file with guidelines for listening–were available on the Supplemental Material page.

2011 Annual Meeting Activities

PAIG’s annual gathering in Minneapolis took place on Saturday, October 29, 2011, from 12:00 to 2:00 pm. It featured a discussion centering on a recently published and thought-provoking book chapter, “Motive, Gesture, and the Analysis of Performance,” by John Rink, Neta Spiro, and Nicolas Gold, from New Perspectives on Music and Gesture, ed. A Gritten and E. King (Ashgate, 2010). The chapter, which probes a Chopin mazurka and its realization in numerous recorded performances, proposes a novel concept of musical motive, deriving from analysis of gestures created through performance.

John Rink has graciously provided PAIG with a review copy of the chapter, which may be downloaded here. A public-domain score of the mazurka is available here. Images of the first editions of the mazurka may be viewed at www.cfeo.org.uk .

2010 Annual Meeting Activities

PAIG’s conducted a special session devoted to performance of the music of Schumann and Chopin, held on Saturday evening, November 6, at the 2010 AMS/SMT Annual Meeting. Here are the abstracts for that session:

Analytic Pathways to Successful Performance Strategies for Works by Chopin and Schumann
David Kopp, Boston University, Moderator

Today’s burgeoning interest in performance and analysis, along with the occasion of the bicentennial anniversaries of the births of Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann, form the inspiration for this special session featuring performances of complete pieces by the two composers. Three distinguished members of the SMT community, plus a special collaborator, will be the session’s presenters. From diverse perspectives, the presentations will address issues concerning the performance of works presenting significant global challenges to the performer, challenges which may be profitably addressed by one or more modes of musical analysis. In each case, analysis, in the context of further performance considerations, will suggest solutions and performance strategies whose methodology and language of expression are relevant to scholars and performers alike. These solutions will be tested in real time by demonstration of performance options for pertinent passages, as well as by the complete performances. A question-and-answer session involving all four participants will follow the presentations.

Performing Expressive Closure in Structurally Open Contexts : Chopin ’s Prélude in A Minor and the Last Dance of Schumann’s Davidsbündlertänze
Robert Hatten Indiana University

Articulation, voicing, pedal, dynamics, and timing—the expressive elements of musical gesture at the piano—are called upon to play a sensitive role in works that feature varying degrees of structural openness or ambiguity. This presentation will demonstrate through performance ways of achieving a satisfying sense of dramatic closure while preserving the expressive significance of structural openness in two Romantic works.

In Chopin’s Prélude in A minor, op. 28, no. 2, attributes of the opening figure help us to interpret the subsequent “melody” as a series of funereal lament gestures. At the end, a finallament gesture supports a succession of precise textural and harmonic shifts that bring about the resolution of the prelude’s essential harmonic ambiguity. Only sensitive gestural voicing, dynamics, and timing can convey the expressive significance of these subtle details, in which the upper line’s voice-leading inexorably reverses a suggested positive “ending” in E, pulling toward tragic desolation in A minor.

Schumann’s  Davidsbündlertänze is a loosely assembled set of dances with an “inset” tonal and cyclical closure returning the key and theme of no. 2, in B minor, in the middle of no. 17, in B major, only to end with a rhetorically-tragic coda in B minor. But this conventional dramatic closure is then itself extended by a tonally open, “superfluous” dance, whose “ending” propels us past the expected formal boundary to an extraordinary climax. Only a just-so articulation and careful attention to dynamics and timing can convey the poignancy of thesedramatic shifts. The multidimensional closure of this final dance thus opens up intimately experiential, as well as Romantic ironic, perspectives on the entire work.

Treading Robert Schumann’s New Path: Analysis and Recomposition as Aids in the
Performance of the Late Lieder
Harald Krebs, University of Victoria

Robert Schumann’s late songs (1849–52) are in some respects difficult to understand and to perform. Paradoxically, it is their apparent simplicity that poses a challenge for performers; harmonically, texturally, and metrically less adventurous than the songs of 1840, they may on first contact appear rather bland. Those who wish to explore Schumann’s “second practice” of song writing must grapple with the questions: 1) What is interesting and expressive about the late songs? and 2) How can their interesting and expressive elements be communicated to listeners?

One striking aspect of the songs is their manner of declaiming the texts; their vocal rhythms depart more drastically from the poetic rhythm than is ever the case in Schumann’s earlier songs. Poetic feet, which would be approximately equivalent in duration in a normal recitation, are set to a wide variety of durations, producing irregular and unpredictable vocal rhythms. Schumann’s new manner of declamation is a significant locus of expression in songs where other potential expressive features are attenuated. Analysis and recomposition can highlight Schumann’s unorthodox declamation for performers, and can guide them toward an understanding of his expressive intentions that helps them to make decisions that enhance the song’s expressive attributes.

Our presentation will contrast deliberately inappropriate live performances with performances that correspond to Schumann’s apparent expressive aims. Songs to be performed and discussed include “Viel Glück zur Reise,” “Schwalben,” “Der schwere Abend,” “Frühlings Ankunft,” and “Nach der Geburt ihres Sohnes.”

On Performing Chopin’s Barcarolle
David Kopp, Boston University

Despite its manifold virtues, Chopin’s Barcarolle, composed late in his career, poses particular challenges to the performer: a sprawling, idiosyncratic formal plan; a pervasive, though genial, sameness of texture, character, and melody; and a succession of short but powerfully expressive subsections toward the end, all culminating in similarly strong cadential arrivals.

This presentation treats aspects of the work from several analytic perspectives bearing on these issues. Signature features of the piece include a landmark opening intervallic motive along with an audibly referential pitch-class motivic pair. The former, through its transformations, inhabits pivotal moments in the musical narrative to be projected. The latter, through its individual elements and their interactions, organizes large-scale relationships of musical meaning which,consciously communicated, can add focus and depth to performance. Aspects of meaning expressed by harmonic relationships associated with the pitch-class motive may be clarified by reference to recent approaches to nineteenth-century chromaticism. On another front, a rethinking of conventional concepts of formal arrival and closure provides clues to shaping and punctuating the final sections in ways that depart notably from typical performance practice,while helping to illuminate some of Chopin’s own dynamic and tempo indications and their variants. Excerpts from the recorded legacy of the Barcarolle will also aid in illustrating these observations. Framing the talk is a vivid, hermeneutically-prompted extramusical association, tied to the sensory impact of the barcarolle genre, that stimulates the analytical imagination as well as the sonic imagination of the performer.

2009 Annual Meeting Activities

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2008 Annual Meeting Activities

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2007 Annual Meeting Activities

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2006 Annual Meeting Activities

PAIG sponsored a special joint SMT/AMS session in Los Angeles entitled “Performing Mozart.” The session featured three distinguished scholar-performers of Mozart’s music—Jaap Schröder, Joel Lester, and Robert Levin—exploring historical developments in bows and bowing techniques, relations between analysis and performance, and Mozart’s approaches to improvisation. In addition to demonstrations on period instruments,  the session included a performance of Mozart’s Sonata in E Minor for Keyboard and Violin, K. 304 by Jaap Schröder and Robert Levin. Joel Lester’s contribution has been published under the title “Analysis and Performing Mozart” in College Music Symposium 51 (http://cms.axiom4.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=14:analysis-and-performing-mozart).

Thanks are due to the three presenters for a varied and stimulating exploration of Mozart’s music, as well as to PAIG’s members for conceiving the session during the 2005 meeting and to Janet Schmalfeldt, William Rothstein, and Daphne Leong for organizing it. Thanks also to SMT, AMS, Harvard University Music Department, UCLA Music Department, Elisabeth Le Guin, and Eric Wang, for their financial support of the session.

At the PAIG business meeting, Daphne Leong handed over the chairing of PAIG to scholar-pianist David Kopp. She summarized PAIG’s growth over the previous two years and thanked all who had participated: PAIG’s members first of all, for their enthusiasm, ideas, and participation; Janet Schmalfeldt for acting as informal advisor; Jan Miyake for creating and maintaining the PAIG e-mail list; James McGowan for creating and maintaining the webPAIG; and Daniel Barolsky, Alan Dodson, and Richard vonFoerster for beginning and editing bibliographies on the site.

2005 Annual Meeting Activities

A brief note on “performance-and-analysis” activity at the SMT conference: the Pedagogy Interest Group’s special session, featuring Clemens Kemme, Bill Rothstein, and Robert Hatten presenting and coaching student performers, and chaired by Gerald Zaritzky, was a tremendous success and a popular draw for many at the conference. Fine contributions were also made in the “Performance and Rhythm” session (Daniel Barolsky, Alan Dodson, Peter Martens) and by individual papers such as Cynthia Folio’s and Aleck Brinkman’s poster session.

Approximately 40 people attended PAIG’s meeting. Plans were made for a special joint SMT/AMS session to take place in 2006 (see above for description). Members were invited to submit listings to a new online bibliographic resource on performance and analysis: annotated (edited by Daniel Barolsky and Alan Dodson), and unannotated (edited by Richard vonFoerster), both indexed by keywords. Jan Miyake oversees PAIG’s e-mail list. James McGowan is the webmaster.

Edward Latham, on behalf of the PAIG, contributed “Analysis and Performance Studies: A Summary of Current Research,” to a project of the German Society for Music Theory involving German and American theorists surveying research in various music-theoretic subfields. The research summaries are published online in 2005 in the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie (http://www.gmth.de/zeitschrift/artikel/521.aspx), as well as in hard copy in the Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie.

Daphne Leong agreed to serve as chair for one additional year, with an informal advisory board consisting of Janet Schmalfeldt and Hali Fieldman.

2004 Annual Meeting Activities

The PAIG met for the first time at SMT-Seattle. About 25 were in attendance; our current membership numbers 55, including members from the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain, as well as North America. Daphne Leong is founding chair.

Interests represented at the meeting included: implications of analysis for performance and vice versa, study of audio/video recordings (empirical and qualitative), work with performers, formal models of relations between analysis and performance, performance practice (historical and contemporary), and pedagogical applications.

The formation of PAIG coincided with an SMT- Seattle special session entitled “Performance and Analysis: Views from Musicology, Theory, and Performance.” Robert Hatten chaired the session, which featured papers by Nicholas Cook, William Rothstein, Daphne Leong and Elizabeth McNutt, and a response by Janet Schmalfeldt. Discussion continued until the 11 pm cut-off time. The session is published in Music Theory Online, framed by opening commentary by Robert Hatten, Janet Schmalfeldt’s response, and further interchange among the panelists.

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