Date/Time:
Date(s) - 03/04/2016
4:30 pm - 5:30 pm
Location:
Rm. 3491 (Large Seminar Rm.), Graduate Center
About:
After this Friday’s Music Forum, two conference paper previews will be happening:
Jake Cohen: “Real Vermonters”: Dorothy Canfield Fisher and the New England Identity of Carl Ruggles
Contemporaries of ultramodern composer Carl Ruggles (1876-1971) often described his music in terms of a mystical universalism. Composers Charles Seeger and Henry Cowell, as well as critic Lawrence Gilman, wrote about the transcendentalist qualities of Ruggles’s pieces. Many scholars have followed similar lines of inquiry, such as Drew Massey’s examination of the “infinite” Ruggles identity, or Carol Oja’s tracing of the influence of theosophy in Ruggles’s idea of ecstatic dissonance. However, scholars have paid far less attention to the more localized, place-oriented identity that Ruggles cultivated in the 1930s and 40s with the help of his Vermont neighbor Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
This paper explores how Fisher molded a Vermont identity for Ruggles that served their personal agendas. Examining two of Fisher’s unpublished essays against recent scholarship in regionalist history, I show how Fisher fit Ruggles’s music into her narrative of Vermont history, which was concerned with the state’s turn-of-the-century struggle with land abandonment. The public persona she crafted for Ruggles fit her mold of a “real Vermonter” and helped promote an image of New England simplicity in line with the state’s touristic efforts. Meanwhile, Ruggles embraced Fisher’s implacement of Vermont identity and landscape into his music because it distanced him from notions of feminized gentility in American musical culture and an Arcadian myth that devalued the sublimity of nature. Ultimately, Ruggles’s New England identity reinforced many of the transcendentalist and universal ideals that he and his friends inscribed in his music.
Daniel Fox: Transferred Agency in Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room”
Echo and reverb are the aural cues through which we deduce information about architectural spaces. According to Emily Thompson, the modernist design ideal for live-performance spaces set the “optimum reverberation time” to zero. Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room” (1969) can be heard as a critique of that aesthetic apparatus: through a feedback process that activates the resonant frequencies of the performance space, the room becomes the instrument. In that influential work the recursive process interpolates between the speech of a human subject and the music of an architectural object, leading Brandon Labelle to observe that Lucier’s stuttering speech builds “an architecture imbued with the problematic of having a body.”
With the human performer silent and seemingly inactive for all but the initial 1’15’’ of the 45’ work, what Jane Goodall referred to as an “agency vacuum,” is created. This paper contends that “I am sitting in a room” can be heard as a “transfer of agency” in which agency leaks away from the human performer and into the instrument. Through both a textual and a reverberant slight-of-hand, the room-instrument addresses the human performer, as if from another place. More important than the transfer of sound-production from human to instrument, this paper will argue that there is a transfer of the agency associated with the act of listening. In this way “I am sitting in a room” re-performs the shift of emphasis, enunciated by Lucier, away from “making sounds happen” and onto listening.
Support for this reading stems from 1) my analysis of Joan La Barbara’s live performance of Lucier’s Palimpsest (2014), a kindred piece built upon the same recursive process, and 2) identifying how the transfer of human agency is an implicit feature of the text-based score for “I am sitting in a room.”
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