Overview
Posts
Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait in Cincinnati
28 July 2023 As part of writing a program note for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s October 2023 performances of Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait (1942) with narration by George Takei, I’ve been tracing performances in and around the city, especially with the CSO. The array of people who have declaimed the spoken portion of the piece is an important part of the piece’s longer and wider story, and Cincinnati’s performances give us a good idea of who has done this.
The Acousmêtric Mrs. Davis
4 June 2023 I’ll get to Mrs. Davis, I promise. Much of my work centers on things in the more distant past, but lately I’ve been chipping away at a project on a trope that seems to me to be something of a canary-sized albatross in film-sound scholarship: Michel Chion’s acousmêtre. Chion elaborated the concept of a disembodied voice in his 1982 book, La Voix au cinéma (translated by Claudia Gorbman in 1999).
When Liza Met Clara
17 July 2022 In the week since her 160th birthday, I’ve been thinking about and listening to the music of Liza Lehmann, whose renown depends heavily on which book you’re reading or who you ask and where you are. She was—as many remarked on her July 11th birthday—quite prolific, writing some 350 songs, a few stage pieces, and some instrumental music for piano or piano/violin.
The Abagnales Sing Along
7 January 2022 Catch Me If You Can (2002), as a piece of filmmaking, is sort of famously clever, sometimes to an extreme, even saccharine degree that tests our willingness to buy into its premise. Its music and sound play a pretty significant role in that challenge; the somewhat uncharacteristic but enthralling style John Williams composed in for the score draws us in, and the various uses of pre-existing music throughout the film do the work that kind of music usually does in film.
Women Vienna Honored
via Europeana 28 November 2021 The project I’m currently finishing an initial draft of is an essay for an upcoming edited collection on the Schumanns, and my contribution covers Clara’s honors and professional affiliations, coming out in the next couple years. I’ve been over-researching it a bit, because it’s led me down some interesting alleys and, as the editors said, these sorts of recognitions have little scholarly coverage.