Society for Music TheorySociety for Music TheoryCommittee on the Status of Women Breakfast Board Meeting
Thursday, October 31, 8:00-11:00 am
CSW Affiliates Luncheon -- Important: note change of venue!
Saturday, November 2, 12:00-2:00 pm
New location: Braddock's Diner on the second floor of the North Market
The luncheon is for anyone interested in the mission and issues of the CSW, and it is the place where the CSW committee members get to hear what is on your minds for projects and problems to tackle in the coming year.
For the last few years, the Affliates luncheon has been held onsite in the conference hotels due to circumstances at particular conference locations. For the Columbus meeting, we will be returning to the "normal" state of affairs and holding the CSW Affiliates Luncheon at a nearby restaurant called Braddock's Diner.
If you wish to come to the lunch, you may either meet Janna Saslaw in the lobby of the hotel or meet at the restaurant. Please send an email to Janna to let her know you are planning on attending so that we tell the restaurant how many to expect.
We look forward to seeing you at the luncheon, and especially look forward to hearing your ideas about how to make the CSW even more valuable to the SMT.
CSW/Jazz Interest Group Joint Session
Friday, November 1, 7:00-10:00 pm
Location TBA
Cynthia Folio (Temple University), Chair
Maria Schneider, Respondent
Maria Schneider's Hang Gliding: Intention and Inference in a Big Band Composition
Henry Martin (Rutgers University - Newark)Mary Lou Williams as Musical Assimilator
Ted Buehrer (Kenyon College)"Doubleness" and Vocal Jazz Improvisation: Uniting Discourses on Race and Gender
Lara Pellegrinelli (Harvard University)Beauty and the Beast: Maria Schneider's Wyrgly
Alexander Stewart (University of Vermont)With Lovie and Lil: Rediscovering Two Chicago Pianists of the 1920s
Jeffrey Taylor (Institute for Studies in American Music, Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center)
Maria Schneider's Hang Gliding: Intention and Inference in a Big Band Composition
Henry Martin (Rutgers University - Newark)
Hang Gliding is an exemplary work by Maria Schneider, one of today's most skillful and successful jazz composers working in the big band idiom. An ongoing issue in contemporary music analysis is the relationship between the intention of a composer and our comprehension of his or her work. Hang Gliding affords us an opportunity to explore these modes of understanding, as Schneider has provided a score of the piece and has agreed to answer questions on its composition, performance, and expressive goals.
After studying the piece, I met with Schneider and recorded our discussion. I explained what I heard in the work and she reacted to my conclusions. During the first part of my talk, I will explain my inferences on the work's structure; in conclusion, I will summarize Schneider's reactions to my study.
This paper will explore both large- and small-scale aspects of the big band composer working in a contemporary-jazz environment. Through various approaches to the piece, I hope to illuminate issues regarding the intersection of composer intention and listener inference and at the same time provide a multivalent understanding of an important work by one of the outstanding jazz composers of our time.
Mary Lou Williams as Musical Assimilator
Ted Buehrer (Kenyon College)
Mary Lou Williams' importance as a jazz pianist and composer/arranger has been, until very recently, largely overlooked. In recent years, however, interest in Williams' life as a musician has increased substantially. Yet for all of the attention given to Williams in the recent past, relatively little work has been done analyzing the music that she composed and arranged.
During her 'early' period, beginning in 1929 and lasting into the 1940s, Williams was influenced by several musicians, including Don Redman, Duke Ellington, and even composers like Paul Hindemith and Arnold Schoenberg. She developed rapidly as a composer and an arranger, and proved herself to be quite adept at assimilating musical styles in her own works. Indeed, Gunther Schuller calls Williams a "major talent" and a "first-rate assimilator," noting that a tendency toward eclecticism marks Williams' entire career.
This paper draws on the materials gathered from the Mary Lou Williams Collection at Rutgers University to investigate the notion of Williams as a musical assimilator. Works such as Big Jim Blues, Lonely Moments, and In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee are used to show that the strength of Williams' compositional style during this early period is her ability to bring together style characteristics from a variety of sources in a musically satisfying way.
"Doubleness" and Vocal Jazz Improvisation: Uniting Discourses on Race and Gender
Lara Pellegrinelli (Harvard University)
Contrary to their popular, feminized images, women jazz vocalists represent masculinities and femininities in their performances of gender. Cast as outsiders to jazz -- not only as a predominantly male tradition but as a male instrumental tradition -- vocalists seek to legitimize their work by becoming active agents between perceived vocal and instrumental categories. Improvisation, considered a central characteristic of jazz performance, assumes particular importance. A critical proving ground for a vocalist's talents, improvisation serves a purpose parallel to "classic blues" texts (Carby 1994; Davis 1998): it is a means by which women articulate power in a political struggle over contested space.
"Doubleness," a term with its roots in African American experience that has been used more broadly to describe issues of culture and identity in minority groups, has aptly been applied to instrumental jazz improvisation as a mode of social interaction, specifically highlighting examples of musical irony (Monson 1994). While this term can naturally be extended to include vocal improvisation, here the conflicting sense of belonging usually associated with race intersects with that of gender. "Doubleness" effectively describes the fractured identities of singers as a minority group in jazz and as women navigating this male-dominated realm.
Beauty and the Beast: Maria Schneider's Wyrgly
Alexander Stewart (University of Vermont)
While building upon the techniques of her mentors, Bob Brookmeyer and Gil Evans, Maria Schneider composes orchestral jazz expressing intensely personal ideas. A favorite subject, as evidenced in pieces such as Bombshelter Beast, Dance You Monster to My Soft Song, and Wyrgly, seems to reflect her fascination with monsters. In Wyrgly (1989) Schneider ingeniously juxtaposes and overlays two musical streams to portray the "metamorphosis" of a monster "from a mesmerizing vapor to an embodiment characterized by a dramatic display of multiple flailing limbs." These two distinct "embodiments" have contrasting melodic themes, harmonic structures and voicings, and grooves.
In composing Wyrgly, Schneider began from the middle and worked outward, using a tone row, or cycle, derived from the central melody to generate many of her ideas. The transition from the light, vaporous sonorities of the opening section to the heavy, "monstrous" shuffle boogie in half-time is one of the piece's most strikingly original concepts.
By the end of the recording neither the "monster vamp" nor the "ethereal vapors" seems to have prevailed. The development of the dual narratives and the ambiguous conclusion, in which the monstrous boogie fades as the wispy chords twice reappear, suggest that both ideas can co-exist.
With Lovie and Lil: Rediscovering Two Chicago Pianists of the 1920s
Jeffrey Taylor (Institute for Studies in American Music, Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center)
The careers of Lillian Hardin Armstrong (1898-1971) and Lovie Austin (1887-1972) in Chicago show intriguing parallels, and as composers, arrangers, and bandleaders, both left an indelible mark on early jazz history. In much scholarly writing, however, their talents as jazz pianists are either ignored or treated with condescension. Yet, though neither Armstrong nor Austin made solo recordings during the 1920s, their extensive work with singers and small groups shows both an imaginative integration of musical styles and a great sensitivity to the demands of vocal accompaniment and ensemble performance.
This paper re-evaluates the piano artistry of these two remarkable women, while placing it in the overarching context of their working lives in 1920s Chicago. In so doing I suggest ways in which Austin and Armstrong negotiated seemingly contradictory pianistic traditions in the African-American community of the time: on the one hand, the female-dominated tradition of "genteel" home music-making that reached back to the 19th century, and, on the other, the more recent, overtly masculine tradition of the ragtime and early jazz "tickler" or "professor."
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updated August 7, 2002