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2015-12-23

2015 in Review and Previewing 2016

This year:

My book chapter on music and disability in William Walton’s score for Laurence Olivier’s Richard III–specifically the ways in which Walton uses altered sounds from the orchestra to create musical manifestations of Richard’s “unnaturalness”–was published as “Music for Richard III: Cinematic Scoring for the Early Modern Monstrous” in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies.
My essay on music, race, and Otherness in the Odin Teatret’s Ur-Hamlet was published as “History Faux/Real: the 2006 Ur-Hamlet,” kadar koli 10 (PDF proof).
I finished the manuscript for Music for Silent Film: A Guide to North American Resources (A-R Editions and the Music Library Association Index and Bibliography Series). The book will be out in the first quarter of 2016.
I gave four scholarly talks or presentations: on public musicology for “Careers Outside of the Academy,” American Musicological Society national meeting; on the Odin Teatret Ur-Hamlet as “History Faux/Real: the 2006 Ur-Hamlet,” BABEL Working Group; about Louise Talma’s chamber opera in “The Autobiographics of Louise Talma’s Have You Heard? Do You Know?,” International Alliance for Women in Music Congress; and on “Aural Ekphrasis as Adaptative Agent,” Shakespeare Association of America, “Memory and Musical Performance” seminar.
I published two poems:“Six Epilogues for Caliban,” appeared in lunch, Summer 2015, and “Varnished,” which appeared in These Fragile Lilacs, Summer 2015.
My 2014 book Louise Talma: A Life in Composition received excellent reviews from Nanette Kaplan Solomon and Rose Dodd.

In 2016, I’ll be

On the radio: I’ll be talking on BBC Radio 3 in January about American composer Louise Talma.
At conferences: I’ll be chairing and presenting at the Society for American Music annual meeting in Boston, leading a seminar on “Music for Silent Film,” in which I’ll discuss my recent work on “Re-Scoring Shylock: Musical Suggestions for the 1912 Merchant of Venice,” 11:00a.m.-1:00 p.m., Friday, 11 March; talking about that music and music for other silent adaptations of the same film in “Music for Silent Merchants” as a participant in the Shakespeare Association of America seminar “Re-evaluating Earlier Generations of Shakespeare Films,” 23-26 March, New Orleans, LA.; on music for silent films about the supernatural and “spook tales” (early horror films) at the ML75.UNT Symposium in Denton, Texas, 22-23 April; and plan to be at the American Musicological Society’s annual meeting in Vancouver, BC.
Publishing: 2016 should see the publications of Music for Silent Film: A Guide to North American Resources and The Art Songs of Louise Talma, part of the College Music Society Sourcebooks in American Music series, as well as some articles and other pieces.
Writing: about Shakespeare and Jazz for a special issue of Borrowers and Lenders, on silent film music, and on Talma.
Editing: with Mariana Whitmer, for our in-progress co-edited collection of essays on the music of the American West in unexpected locales, Music for New Frontiers: Re-Locating the Sounds of the Western.

2015-12-12

More fantastic praise for Louise Talma: A Life in Composition

I’m absolutely thrilled by this review by Rose Dodd of Louise Talma: A Life in Composition in Tempo, Volume 70, Issue 275 (January 2016, pp 109 – 111. DOI: 10.1017/S0040298215000844, Published online: 07 December 2015).

A taste:

Kendra Preston Leonard’s book is densely packed with a level of detail that, for a single volume, is comprehensive to say the least. Many new sources have been drawn upon that are more easily accessible due to transformation in digital archiving procedures, notably Talma’s personal archive which has, since her death, been partially catalogued by the Library of Congress. Her work is scrutinised for its personal, musicological and political stances. Also included within the text is a detailed analytical unpicking of works salient to this variety of approaches. The intellectual rigour behind the volume is dexterous and impressive, and the intermingling of analytical approaches could well be adopted for many more biographical and musicological studies. Viewing a composer and their work at a distance and separate from what has informed their work is anachronistic, so it is a pleasure to discover that so many narratives within Talma’s creative life are made transparent to the reader.

A characteristic of Kendra Preston Leonard’s writing throughout could be said to be the quality of the ‘yarn’. Put simply, each chapter draws you in. The author’s writing style is such that at the beginning of a chapter, one is not entirely sure what road it will take; where we, the reader, will end up. It is a stimulating read, a book not easily put down, which hopefully signals the advent of more vibrant musicological writing that tells a story for now, rather than brushing off some dusty old documents found in a university library and remodelling those into a worthy tome.

The strength I most admired in the writing style was the gentle prodding and nudging around boundaries of gender and queer politics. The autobiographical is clearly present through- out – Leonard gently scrutinises issues that sub- tly raise complex and contentious issues of personal politics. There is a clarity, poise and maturity in the writing which serves with vitality the advancement of Talma’s work: I hope this book will reach a wide readership and lead to a resurgence of interest in the music of Louisa Talma.

2015-12-01

ML75.UNT Symposium at the University of North Texas, April 2016

I’m please to announce that I’ll be speaking at the University of North Texas’s ML75. UNT Symposium, celebrating the Music Library’s 75th anniversary. The Symposium takes place April 22-23, 2016. I’ll be talking about music in the library’s Special Collections–my full abstract is below.

Music for Silent “Spook Tales” in the University of North Texas Music Library Special Collections

The University of North Texas’s Music Library’s Special Collections is home to an extraordinary collection of about 300 pieces of music written or arranged between 1895 and 1929 for silent film accompaniment. This collection includes a number of pieces exclusive to the UNT Music Library, not found in any other public institution or repository. Even more remarkably, the UNT collection’s pieces contain, in almost every case, full sets of instrumental parts. Music for silent films was distributed in a number of formats, with sheet music for piano alone being the most common. However, cinemas with orchestras—ensembles ranging from 3-30 musicians—developed libraries of pieces that could be compiled into a score for accompanying a film. Often the parts for pieces were lost when such orchestras disbanded after the advent of sound, and to find so many pieces with all of their instrumental parts is unusual. Other distinguishing features of the collection are its representation of works published outside of the United States, particularly from France and Germany; and its holding of works by accomplished but little-known silent film composers whose works are not preserved in other collections. The collection also contains several full scores, complete with parts, for specific films. Thus the UNT collection offers many possible topics of research among its riches.

The majority of music in the UNT silent film music collection comprises what was known as “mood” or genre music, such as Harry Norton’s “Combat” (1919); William C. Schoenfeld’s “Dungeon Scene” (1925); and Theo Knoche’s “Love, Passion” (1926). But the collection also holds unusual and rare pieces for portraying the supernatural on film, including three pieces for extended scenes. These pieces all depict manifestations of the human afterlife: Bert A. Anthony’s “The Ghost in the Haunted Room” (1924); Walter Broy’s “Ghost Scene” (1926); and “Phantom Visions; Skeleton Dance” (1920) by Ellsworth Stevenson. While these works are influenced by earlier musical depictions of the supernatural, particularly from the nineteenth century, they also introduce new musical gestures and textures that are designed to match the ways in which the paranormal was shown on film. Ghosts, phantoms, and dancing skeletons were enormously popular with early moving picture filmmakers and audiences. For producers, “spook tales”—as early horror or macabre movies were called—offered the opportunity to exploit the new medium to the fullest. The earliest spook tale known, Georges Méliès’s Le Manoir du Diable (1896), used stop-motion and double-exposure techniques to create the illusion of witches, demons, ghosts, and other supernatural figures appearing and disappearing mysteriously and moving through solid scenery. Such technical filmmaking virtuosity demanded accompanying music that could equally convey surprise, the mysterious, and the eerie. My analysis of Anthony’s, Broy’s, and Stevenson’s works will explore the ways composers achieved these qualities and how this new music written especially for film both called upon musical references of the past and created new signifiers for the supernatural. My presentation will conclude with an example of how this music might have been used to accompany an early spook tale.