CMSC 2011
The eighth annual Columbia Music Scholarship Conference takes place on
Saturday, March 5, 2011—301 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University. The theme
of this year's conference is Sound at Play: Music, Humor, and Games..
Schedule
9:30-10:00am
Breakfast/ Coffee
10am-11:30am Session 1
11:30am-1pm Session 2
1pm-2:30pm Lunch (catered for all)
2:30-4pm
Session 3
4:15pm Keynote
5:15pm Closing remarks and reception
All events are free and open to the public.
10am-11:30am Session 1. Nathan Martin, moderator.
Music and Historical Humor
Competition and
the Comic Style in Il marito giocatore (1719)
Keith Johnston,
University of Toronto
Most recent psychological studies on the interaction of
humor and play emphasize their salutary effect (Mannell
and McMahan 1982; Sanville 1999; Richman
2003). These studies are part of a
larger body of literature which focuses on the relationship between humor
and mental health (Lefcourt 2001, et al). Some researchers in the humanities,
however, have continued to promote the superiority of theory of humor which
posits that laughter arises from competition (Gruner
1997). This paper examines the role
of competition and chance in the creation of musical humor. I take as my case study the most
performed intermezzo of the eighteenth century, Giuseppe Maria Orlandini’s Il marito giocatore (1719).
Orlandini’s intermezzo tells the story of an
inveterate gambler who takes revenge upon his disapproving wife when she
demands a divorce. Competition plays
a vital role in all levels of the intermezzo. The husband competes at cards and the
couple competes with each other.
Many of their interactions are in the form of an “elastic gag,” a
type of humorous dialogue which originates with improvised theatre (Andrews
1993). This paper examines the
importance of this style of comedy to the creation of the intermezzo’s
musical language. It first explores
contemporary attitudes towards play, competition, and gambling. I then suggest that the “elastic gag”
technique which governs much of the libretto influences the periodic
construction of the musical phrase.
Musical humor in the intermezzo is therefore dependent upon
principles of play and competition.
“Mit gutem Humor”: Topics as Conveyors of Wit and Humor
in Schumann’s Instrumental Music
Ji-Young Kim, Cornell University
Illuminations of humor in the music of Robert Schumann have
often fallen back on the literary-aesthetic categories of romantic wit and
irony, particularly as evidenced in the writings of Jean Paul, Friedrich
Schlegel, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. That literary discourse has dominated such
discussions is understandable given the composer’s background and
documented interests. But the literary-aesthetic has been linked to the musico-analytical mostly at the level of musical form,
yielding rather cerebral and unfunny results.
This paper attempts an alternative approach by deploying
topical analysis to foreground the playful aspects of Schumann’s music. In
so doing, it shifts the emphasis away from musical form and towards surface
phenomena. While Leonard Ratner developed the
notion of topic to describe music in the classic style, this paper follows
upon Kofi Agawu’s observation in Music as
Discourse that 18th century topics persisted in 19th century music, albeit
in different contexts and with different expressive purposes.
One such purpose is to convey wit and humor. Through an
overview of excerpts from Schumann’s solo piano and chamber music, broader
categories of Volkston (or “popular style”) and
more characteristic 18th century markers will emerge as important conveyors
of these affects, usually via specific dance topics. Agawu
acknowledges that topical analysis in and of itself may be insufficient; it
does not furnish an explanatory apparatus of musical meaning. And yet,
topics may function as important and arguably more direct communicators of
humor than Schumann’s idiosyncratic adoption of literary strategies.
Playing with
perfection: Jascha Heifetz and the art of bad
violin playing
Dario Sarlo, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Known widely as the “perfect violinist,” Jascha
Heifetz (1901-1987) set a new standard for violin playing in the twentieth
century. After his London debut in 1920, Heifetz received a letter from
George Bernard Shaw:
My dear Heifetz, Your recital has filled me and my wife with
anxiety. If you provoke a jealous God by playing with such superhuman
perfection, you will die young. I earnestly advise you to play something
badly every night before going to bed instead of saying your prayers. No
mere mortal should presume to play as faultlessly as that.
Shaw’s comments are more than just a witty response; they
provide a starting point for examining the relationship between Heifetz’s
undeniable technical mastery and his lifelong fascination with the comical
imitation of bad violin playing. Although not widely known, Heifetz made
more than a dozen “bad” recordings under the pseudonym Joseph Hague,
accompanied by the pianist “Floyd E. Sharp,” and he also performed a concerto
in this same manner for a group of his students as part of a filmed masterclass series.
To provide context to the discussion, this paper will
examine the formation of the “perfection” legend and its development
throughout Heifetz’s career, and will question how and why such imitation
performances make us laugh. By comparing two performances of the same
piece—by Heifetz and “Hague”—this paper will ask what can be learned about
violin playing, about musical humor, and about Heifetz himself.
11:30am-1pm Session 2. Gavin Steingo, moderator.
Music and Games
Games and Art: the
Autonomous, the Everyday, and the Virtual
David Gutkin, Columbia University
Numerous twentieth-century artistic practices (earlier ones
as well) seem to intentionally obfuscate the difference between game and
art: e.g., Iannis Xenakis’
game compositions Duel and Stratégie, related
game pieces by composer John Zorn, the Fluxus
movement’s “Fluxgames,” Oulipian
literary games, John Cage’s musicalized game of
chess with Marcel Duchamp, Gabriel Orozco’s sculpture that is effectively a
circular billiard table. A host of ontological and classificatory problems
arise: Can art be (simultaneously?) a game?; Can games (including sports?)
be art? Skeptical that such definitional questions can be plausibly
answered (for reasons that I will address), and in fact convinced that they
follow a faulty premise, in this paper I engage such issues in order to
bring into focus a somewhat different theme: put simply, I ask what various
ludic art practices might tell us about the
dialectical relations between the concepts of “autonomy” and “the
everyday.” Specifically, I propose that the concept “game” may shed a new
light on the supposed rupture between formalist, hermetically sealed
“autonomous art” (e.g., post-WWII serial music as a late manifestation of
this) and “neo-avant-garde” attempts to eradicate barriers between art and
everyday life (e.g., Cageian indeterminate
practices). Finally I suggest that the prominence of the “virtual” in both postmodern
games and art reflects a strange, and in some ways politically reactionary
hybrid between ideologies of autonomy and the aesthetics of the everyday.
Playing with
leadership: adolescent music in Bahia, Brazil
Arnie Daniel Schoenberg, San Diego City College
Using participant-observation in small percussion groups in
Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, I examine how
adolescents develop leadership skills through music. I compare leadership
in band rehearsals to administrative meetings with a non-governmental
organization that uses music to improve the lives of young African
descendants. I focused my observations on communication and problem solving
in both rehearsals and meetings. My findings suggest that music contributes
to the leadership development of adolescents through the music per se and
through its social context. The social context for leadership development
includes a racial-musical-educational project and other recreational activities.
Music per se develops leadership by forcing adolescents to renegotiate
social roles, by promoting the development of increased attentiveness, and
by inspiring motivation through shared escapism. An important feature of
leadership development was ludic behavior within
music, fooling-around during rehearsals. It was always an invitation for
others to join in the behavior or at least witness it, which implied
abandoning or lessening the importance of the task at hand, usually
withdrawing from reviewing the repertoire and learning new songs. But the
judicious use of disruptive behavior had the positive function of
abandoning or lessening the importance of the problem at hand, which often,
because of frustration, had worked its way into a vicious cycle. I conclude
that music contributes to leadership development by providing a communal
experience in which adolescents can efficiently rehearse negotiations of
power in a ludic setting that mitigates personal
conflicts.
Rock Band Etudes:
Pleasure and learning in music games and pedagogical pieces
Peter Shultz,
University of Chicago
The pleasures of music-themed video games such as the Rock
Band series are usually compared to those of instrumental musicianship. To
critics, they turn musical performance into a mechanical, uncreative
exercise; to defenders, they extend its pleasures to non-musicians and
musicians alike. But by focusing on the role of creative expression in
these games, this framing obscures the pleasures they offer of learning and
mastery. Their songs are not just audio tracks but also patterns of
gesture, sequenced and arranged into a playful pedagogy. This paper
suggests that the game-like aspects of Rock Band can lend insight into études and pedagogical music, and that the pleasures of
instrumental musicianship are more game-like than commonly thought.
Musical patterns in Rock Band's songs are analogous to
patterns in game design, as described by game designers in interviews and
essays. The most salient of these patterns are elaborated repetition,
learn-practice-test progressions, and “summits”—moments of respite after
difficult stretches. These “ludomusical” formulas
allow Rock Band's music to serve as both soundtrack and game level.
The same patterns appear in keyboard études
by Chopin and Ligeti. This suggests that these
pieces might also considered instances of game design, written as much to
be learned as to be performed. Thus, the language of game design helps
elucidate the pleasure of learning music— whether through video games,
sight-reading, or plain old repeated practice.
2:30-4pm Session 3. Rachel Mundy, moderator.
Musical Play and New Media
A sea of others:
play and its consequences in a physically-modeled video and sound
environment
Patricia Alessandrini and Rob King
This paper addresses play in a series of collaborative works
consisting of ambient game situations in which audience members determine
sonic events according to the actions of their avatars in a
physically-modeled underwater world. The music in these situations acts as
a motivation for acting and playing in the virtual world. The first work
(2010) is a network performance involving a trio of musicians in three
separate performance spaces. In the projected video, primitive sea
creatures seeking life-sustaining micro-organisms - each controlled via an iPad/iPod/iPhone application
– interact with one another while at the same time subject to the presence
of other oceanic avatars; these latter are set into motion by the audio
from the live musicians, and their movements create windows through which
sound (processed recordings of Mozart) may be released into physical models
of plates, which resonate in response. The creatures’ actions also
influence other aspects of the electronics - such as causing the virtual
plates to bend and fluctuate – and generate the score for the musicians. As
the audience in each site sees and hears the interactions of the musicians
and the underwater avatars, the shared display reveals what happens as the
actions of individuals co-exist in a sea of others. The second work (2011)
will use similar techniques for a trio including voice. In this case,
‘successful’ interactions by the creatures will cause bits of text to be
concatenated, and ‘failure’ will lead to the dissipation of words into
drops of water (synthesized through physical modeling).
Combat Music and
Transitional Seams: Toward a Theory of Musical Modularity in 21st-Century
Video Games
Elizabeth
Medina-Gray, Yale University
Music lends an important vitality to the virtual
environments of video games. It
can—when used successfully—both contribute to the player’s sense of
immersion in the game world, and adapt to (and functionally support) a
specific gameplay experience. This need for adaptability, coupled with
the unpredictability of the player’s actions, makes modular musical
design—an abstract array of pre-composed segments of music that are
triggered at specific circumstances in the game—an excellent fit for game
construction. These modules do not
exist in a vacuum, however, and as the player interacts with the game
world, these small pieces of music transition from one to another or layer
on top of each other, yielding interactions, or “seams,” between the
modules themselves. The relative
smoothness or disjunction across these modular seams has the potential to
either deflect the player’s attention from the music or to attract it,
yielding functional and immersive effects that—because of the uncertainty
of timing—the composer can only broadly control.
The present paper begins to explore the roles of modular
smoothness and disjunction by focusing on one type of music common in many
video games: combat music. Function
is especially important in combat music, since the transitions into and out
of this music must alert the player to critical changes in the game
state. This paper examines music
from two games of the past ten years, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Nintendo, 2002) and Assassin’s Creed II (Ubisoft, 2009), with close attention to those musical
qualities—particularly tonality, macroharmony,
and rhythm and meter—that most strongly contribute to smoothness and
disjunction (and subsequently immersion and function) across the modular
seams of these games.
Minimalist Cultural
Practice in Humor
Galen Brown, Sequenza21.com
You click a link in an e-mail or on a website, hit play on a
YouTube video, or download an mp3, and then it happens: Instead of the
content you expected, you get Rick Astley singing
his 1987 hit “Never Gonna Give You Up,” and
you’ve been Rickrolled. Again. By the fall of
2008, the phenomenon was so widely known that Rick Astley
himself was recruited to Rickroll viewers of the
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. But why is Rickrolling
funny?
In his book Repeating Ourselves, Robert Fink relates
pulse-based minimalist music to a broader “cultural practice” of minimalism
in which an extreme repetition born of modernity is a pervasive cultural
force. As illustrated by Rick Astley, the
cultural practice of minimalism extends to humor, and I intend to
demonstrate that much repetitive or static humor is “minimalist” in a
fairly strict sense, i.e. that certain strains of this humor engage
conceptually with repetition and stasis as a sort of meta-humor, much in
the way that early minimalist music deals conceptually with the repetition
of sounds and the limitation of materials. In fact, I will argue that the
same tools we use to study minimalist are particularly well-suited to the
analysis of minimalist humor.
A single instance of a Rickroll is
funny primarily in relation to the broader cultural phenomenon--precisely
because it has already happened so many times. Monty Python, Family Guy,
Andy Kaufman, and others can all be seen as practitioners of minimalist
comedy.
4:15pm
Keynote
Ludomusicality
Roger Moseley, Cornell
University
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