Bordering Spaces and Encounters in Music of Gabriela Ortiz [abstract only]

The Mexican city of Cuidad Juárez, Chihauhaua, across the river from El Paso, Texas, has become a flashpoint for the complex of values of border relations between the United States and Mexico. Two works of Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz confront ever-present problems of drug trafficking and violent death (the “disappeared women of Cuidad”) in, respectively, her video-opera ¡Únicamente la verdad! (Only the Truth!) (2008-10) and 2009 “requiem” setting Río Bravo for six female voices and crystal cups to text by Mónica Sánchez Escuer. ¡Únicamente la verdad! crosses boundaries of fact and fiction, myth and reality, documentary, opera, and corrido (Mexican ballad). Drawing on specific journalistic reports, it explores border imaginations of Camelia La Tejana, a woman fictionalized in the narcocorrido Contrabando y traición (Smuggling and Betrayal) made popular by the norteño music band Los Tigres del Norte in the 1970s. In multiple musical references (corrido, la música ranchera, cumbia del norte, art/popular music), scene five enacts the journalist César Güemes’s interview of Camelia María, one of the “Camelias” of the opera, and her resistance to his attempt to pin down the “real” Camelia. Ortiz’s 2009 work, Río Bravo takes a different turn in honoring the “lost “disappeared” women (Desaparecidos) of the Juárez maquiladoras (sweatshops). Their voices, “without echo”, multiply through work’s musical “echoing”, articulating the strangeness of their musical displacements of Escuer’s poem. I consider how private spaces—the interview, the requiem—can have public impact in musically enacting and ritualizing the stark realities of individual experience and loss

The Rise and Fall, and the Rise (Again) of Feminist Research in Music: 'What Goes Around Comes Around'

This article reports from a two-phase study that involved an analysis of the extant literature followed by a three-part survey answered by seventy-one women composers. Through these theoretical and empirical data, the authors explore the relationship between gender and music’s symbolic and cultural capital. Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus is employed to understand the gendered experiences of the female composers who participated in the survey. The article suggests that these female composers have different investments in gender but that, overall, they reinforce the male habitus given that the female habitus occupies a subordinate position in relation to that of the male. The findings of the study also suggest a connection between contemporary feminism and the attitudes towards gender held by the participants. The article concludes that female composers classify themselves, and others, according to gendered norms and that these perpetuate the social order in music in which the male norm dominates

Experiencing Chen Yi’s Music: Local and Cosmopolitan Reciprocities in Ning for Pipa, Violin and Cello (2002)

Chen Yi’s music, particularly her Ning for Pipa, Violin and Cello (2002), constructs reciprocities in compositional and aesthetic practice, and in the social-relational dynamics of musical contrast, performative and commemorative impulses. One aim of my paper is to suggest how Chen’s music offers multiple affiliations for music listeners, such that the local emerges in the cosmopolitan and vice versa. Events and textures emerge from, and become emblematic in emotional (affective) characters, in multiple orientations and receptions. Chen counterpoints and integrates the durational patterning suggestive of irregular Chinese “Ba Ban” tunes and more regular melodic models extending from popular song (e.g., the “Mo Li Hua” tune in Ning). Moving between, displacing and traversing—these emerging associations, narratives, encounters and migrations, entangle listening experiences of self and community, borderland and nation, and trauma and place

Pitch-class Function, Centricity, And Symmetry As Transposition Relations In Two Works Of Stravinsky.

Stravinsky has long been known to use small pitch-class collections, particularly four-note symmetrical sets; what has not been systematically examined is the intervallic constitution of such sets, their roles as centric structures, and their relationship to the functional pitch successions within a musical work. Concepts of pitch-class function (temporal and conceptual ordering), centricity (referentiality), and symmetry are necessary to understand pitch-succession in twentieth century works. These concepts are clarified and applied, in particular, to characterize transposition relationships within and among small pitch-class sets. Examples of the treatment of such sets are offered for two diverse works, the Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914) and the second movement of the Octet for Wind Instruments (1923, revised in 1952). The first two chapters examine the ideas of pitch-class function and centricity, their meanings for various writers, and their relationships to various temporal and conceptual frameworks. A brief sketch of a conventional tonal system follows along with a discussion of methods of altering a common-practice model. The properties of symmetrical sets and of four-note sets in particular are discussed in the third chapter. These sets are categorized by their internal interval-class relationships. This study considers small symmetrical pitch-class sets as products of Stravinsky's broader compositional practice of functionally pairing identical interval structures at particular transposition levels. His pairing of identical structures often results in the position complementation of pitch-class, a relationship of pitch-classes, often invariant, in complementary positions within inversionally- or transpositionally-related sets. The relationships of transposition pairing and position complementation effect an opposition of paired structures that is resolved in various ways within the context of each work; moreover, these relationships indicate ways in which Stravinsky's metaphor of polarity may be associated with consistent theoretical descriptions of musical relationships in each work. An alternative to the axial treatment of symmetrical pitch-class relationships associated with Schoenberg, Berg and Bartok, Stravinsky's treatment is non-axial in nature because it references conventional tonal transposition relations associated with the (tonal) diatonic set. A change in transposition pairing relationships is associated with functional processes of progression and closure in each piece. Identical interval structures exhibiting transportation pairing and position complementation are positioned in specific formal positions within a piece conveying the drawing together and separation of poles of attraction, Stravinsky's metaphor for musical form. This study employs theoretical models, such as interval-cycle models, viewed from the perspective of referentially-centric pc structures to describe relationships within and between small pitch-class collections and small and large temporal spans of each work.Ph.D.Communication and the ArtsMusicUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/127572/2/8116269.pd

Experiencing Chen Yi's music: Local and Cosmopolitan Reciprocities in Ning for pipa, violin and cello

Chen Yi’s music, particularly her Ning for Pipa, Violin and Cello (2002), constructs reciprocities in compositional and aesthetic practice, and in the social-relational dynamics of musical contrast, performative and commemorative impulses. One aim of my paper is to suggest how Chen’s music offers multiple affiliations for music listeners, such that the local emerges in the cosmopolitan and vice versa. Events and textures emerge from, and become emblematic in emotional (affective) characters, in multiple orientations and receptions. Chen counterpoints and integrates the durational patterning suggestive of irregular Chinese “Ba Ban” tunes and more regular melodic models extending from popular song (e.g., the “Mo Li Hua” tune in Ning). Moving between, displacing and traversing—these emerging associations, narratives, encounters and migrations, entangle listening experiences of self and community, borderland and nation, and trauma and place