Ancient Mesopotamian Music, the Politics of Reconstruction, and Extreme Early Music

I write this piece primarily as a musicologist and amateur early music practitioner (viola da gamba player) who tries to understand the ways twentieth- and twenty-first century musicians and scholars have imagined and performed ancient music and dance. This essay emerged from my book project Performing Antiquity: Ancient Greek Music and Dance from Paris to Delphi, 1890-1935 and brings my training as a historical musicologist and dance historian to bear on issues typically of concern to archaeologists, classicists, and linguists. While working on that book, I kept running across a number of individuals working now who are deeply engaged in the same kinds of reconstruction and performance projects like the ones I discuss. This essay serves as the first step toward a “sequel” so to speak to my previous book. I started by interviewing a number of these practitioners of extreme early music (music from before 800 CE), including performers, instrument builders, and scholars in classics and archaeology. Their generosity of time and willingness to share inform my gentle treatment of their work. I am not here to serve as judge and jury to determine if their interpretations, recreations, restorations, or composition are authentic, and I hope that readers don’t get too caught up in these questions either. Instead, I hope readers use the politics and performance of extreme early music to interrogate the ways we perform multiple pasts today.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/books/1077/thumbnail.jp

Dancing Greek Antiquity in Private and Public: Isadora Duncan's Early Patronage in Paris

This paper maps Isadora Duncan’s navigation of public and private venues, audiences, and receptions of “Greek” dances from her early career in Paris. I explore Duncan's relationship with Paris’ lesbian communities and the proliferation of ancient Greek dance in both private and public venues. Through comparisons to her contemporaries I contend that Duncan was aware of her early audiences’ interest in exotic and erotic representations of antiquity, and that she realigned these aspects of her art in later writings to appeal to changing aesthetics and interpretations of antiquity

2023: Samuel N. Dorf, Milestone Book Selection

Promotion to the rank of Professor, Department of Musichttps://ecommons.udayton.edu/svc_milestone/1121/thumbnail.jp

Satie, Erik Alfred Leslie (1866–1925)

Erik Satie’s compositions, writings, and humor played an important role in many modernist movements of the twentieth century. Experimenting with simple forms, neoclassicism, mysticism, satire, and Dadaism, Satie collaborated with prominent artists, musicians, and institutions including Vincent Hypsa, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Rene Clair, Francis Picabia, Claude Debussy, Man Ray, the Ballets Russe, the Ballets Suédois. Most recognized today for early his modal, pseudo-antique dances, the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes, Satie also composed popular tunes, humorous piano works that mocked musical conventions, avant-garde ballets, as well as numerous mystical, irreverent, and nonsensical writings and drawings. His works and persona, sometimes whimsical, arcane, gothic, mystical, or Dadaistic inspired later generations of modernist artists and composers such as Les Six, Virgil Thomson, and John Cage

Erik Satie’s Socrate (1918), Myths of Marsyas, and un style dépouillé

It is almost easier to say what Erik Satie’s Socrate is not rather than what it is. It has proved enigmatic since its première, when the audience giggled at its conclusion, confused by the strange sincerity of the work, especially since it was written by a composer known for his humorous piano pieces (Harding 1975, 183). Scholars have defined Socrate’s clear, unadorned musical lines as modernist, abstract, and even quasi–socialist and minimalist (see Danuser 2004, 261–62; Shattuck 1968, 168; Fulcher 2005, 146–51; and Wilson 2007, 215–16). The work also defies traditional categorizations of genre: Satie designated Socrate not as an oratorio, a symphony, or an opera, but as a drame symphonique, scored for chamber orchestra and four soprani. Satie envisioned the work as incidental music for the reading of Plato. The soprani sing selections in French from Plato’s dialogues on the life of Socrates in a detached style, as if reading. Socrate eschews the grand theatricality of the opera stage in favor of the intimacy of the salon. Socrate resists spectacle

Performing Antiquity: Ancient Greek Music and Dance from Paris to Delphi, 1890-1930

Book investigates collaborations between French and American scholars of Greek antiquity (archaeologists, philologists, classicists, and musicologists), and the performing artists (dancers, composers, choreographers and musicians) who brought their research to life at the birth of Modernism. The book tells the story of performances taking place at academic conferences, the Paris Opéra, ancient amphitheaters in Delphi, and private homes. These musical and dance collaborations are built on reciprocity: the performers gain new insight into their craft while learning new techniques or repertoire and the scholars gain an opportunity to bring theory into experimental practice, that is, they have a chance see/hear/experience what they have studied and imagined. The performers receive the imprimatur of scholarship, the stamp of authenticity, and validation for their creative activities. Drawing from methods and theory from musicology, dance studies, performance studies, queer studies, archaeology, classics and art history the book shows how new scholarly methods and technologies altered the performance, and, ultimately, the reception of music and dance of the past. Acknowledging and critically examining the complex relationships performers and scholars had with the pasts they studied does not undermine their work. Rather, understanding our own limits, biases, dreams, obsessions, desires, loves, and fears enriches the ways we perform the past.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/books/1020/thumbnail.jp

Atossa’s Dream Yoking Music and Dance, Antiquity and Modernity in Maurice Emmanuel’s Salamine (1929)

This essay explores the conflicting trends of tradition and modernism, unity and independence in Parisian musical and dance culture in the late 1920s through an analysis of Maurice Emmanuel’s (1863-1938) aesthetics of contemporary and ancient Greek music and dance. It begins by outlining and critiquing Emmanuel’s relevant scholarly contributions to ancient Greek dance history and music history before demonstrating how these tensions manifested in the 1929 production of Emmanuel’s opera Salamine based on Aeschylus’s The Persians. Exploring Emmanuel’s aesthetics of music and dance (ancient and modern) affords a unique opportunity to see how these creative media were theorized and practiced in the tumultuous years after the Ballets russes, while illustrating some of the conflicts between what Léandre Vaillat termed “the academic and the eurhythmic” in dance and music.À travers une analyse de l’esthétique musicale et chorégraphique dans la Grèce ancienne et moderne de Maurice Emmanuel (1863-1938), cet article explore les conflits entre tradition et modernité, unité et indépendance au sein des cultures parisiennes de la musique et de la danse vers la fin des années 1920. Nous commencerons par une critique générale des contributions d’Emmanuel à l’histoire de la musique et de la danse avant de faire la démonstration des problématiques susmentionnées, lesquelles se sont manifestées dans l’opéra Salamine (1929), d’après Les Perses d’Eschyle. En explorant l’esthétique musico-chorégraphique ancienne et moderne d’Emmanuel, nous nous prévalons d’une opportunité unique d’examiner les façons dont les disciplines de la musique et de la danse étaient analysées et pratiquées durant les années tumultueuses suivant l’avènement des Ballets russes. Notre étude met également en lumière certains conflits entre ce que Léandre Vaillat appelait « l’académique et l’eurythmique » en danse et en musique

2018: Samuel N. Dorf, Milestone Book Selection

Promotion to the rank of Associate Professor, Department of Musichttps://ecommons.udayton.edu/svc_milestone/1016/thumbnail.jp

The Music of Faith and Culture: A Conversation with Dr. Samuel N. Dorf

In this moving and illuminating interview, our very own Dr. Samuel Dorf of the University of Dayton asks the tough question: when we think we have an answer to the question of what culture is, in what way has that answer been shaped for us by outside forces? Is culture really what \u27most people\u27 assume it to be? Or ought its definition to include especially those aspects of life that are not often considered to be part of \u27culture\u27? Reflecting on his work in musicology, his and his family\u27s Jewish faith, and the importance of combatting injustice in the Jewish tradition, Dr. Dorf weaves for us an intricate portrait, a symphony, if you will, of faith and culture lived out and experienced from generation to generation.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/faith_culture_wfwc/1011/thumbnail.jp

Anthology to Accompany Gateways to Understanding Music

This anthology to accompany Gateways to Understanding Music is comprised of musical texts. These broadly defined texts—primarily musical scores—facilitate the integration of score study and music theory into the ethno/musicology curriculum, a necessary focus in the training of the professional musician. As posed by the textbook, the last question in each modular gateway is Where do I go from here? This resource provides one more opportunity to go beyond the textbook to examine music scores and texts in even greater depth. This anthology is a combination of primary sources for study: musical scores and music transcriptions, along with a few primary source documents and musical exercises.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/books/1083/thumbnail.jp