This study explores the denationalization of traditional Asian instruments by Korean composers, Unsuk Chin and Jin Hi Kim. It examines how these composers obscure, respectively, the sheng and the geomungo beyond their national-cultural origins. In & Scaron;u f & uuml;r Orchester (2009/2010), Chin integrates the sheng into a Western-style orchestra, transforming different texture, gesture, and timbre to create what I call a distinct "third sound." In Ghost Komungobot (2018), Kim manipulates the geomungo's physical structure and electronically recontextualizes its sound into a digitally mediated space. Through these strategies, both composers challenge reductive racialized, nationalistic, or ethnocentric paradigms of non-Western instruments. This study ultimately argues for an expanded understanding of intercultural and organological politics in contemporary music beyond conventional nationalist and postcolonial frames.
The librettist Charles Jennens remarked on Handel's acquisition of the "Carillon" (bells) for his oratorio Saul to "make poor Saul stark mad." Handel employed the instrument in depicting the Israelite women welcoming King Saul and David home from war; their celebration, however, enrages Saul as he perceives their greater preference for David over him. Scholarship has discussed the role of the carillon only as an accompaniment to the women's song that offends the king, but this article examines various aspects of English bell culture and ideas to consider how the sound itself might have been used to trigger Saul's madness.
This article presents a hermeneutic reconstruction of the educational path that Stanis & lstrok;aw Moniuszko developed and followed in his music teaching practice. Musicological analysis focuses on his unpublished manuscript titled School of Music Reading (ca. 1863-68), now in the collection of the Warsaw Music Society. For more than 150 years, this forgotten and unresearched piece of work was considered devoid of any substantial value. An in-depth analysis of this source, taking into account previously unknown or ignored facts, has made it possible to discuss the educational work of this artist, who has long been perceived solely as an eminent Polish composer.
In this colloquy response to my monograph On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone, I situate my race scholarship within my life as a Black, biracial, Midwesterner, and as a cellist, Russianist, and music theorist. I promote an integrationist approach to music and music studies, and I confront the white supremacist and patriarchal roots of classical music and music theory in the United States. As I engage with each colloquist, I challenge Marxist, class-struggle, and purely Black-radical critiques of my work as I defend centering whiteness in order to dismantle it. I call for confronting music's elitism, antiblackness, antisemitism, anti-Asianness, and other exclusionary structures so that we might all, together, build more just and welcoming musical institutions.
In an effort to present a new context of engagement between Berg and the culture of his time and space, Pierre Bourdieu's social theories of habitus and field are applied to create a unique understanding of social influences that motivated Berg to compose his operas Wozzeck and Lulu. This article investigates the narrative symbolisms found in the two operas as they reflect Berg's experiences in Vienna and the prevailing public interpretations of Viennese society at the time. Bourdieu's theoretical framework illustrates the parodying nature of the operas, both of which mirror hypocritical and subversive elements of Vienna's identity of place.
In Phillip Ewell's 2023 book, On Music Theory and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone, he provides a theoretical framework analyzing the actions and policies of white structures within a binary: antiracist or DEI. An example he provides of a DEI framework includes staging a rendition of Shirley Graham Du Bois's opera Tom Tom, while an antiracist approach has a scholar writing a paper explaining the structural policies and incentives that excluded Tom Tom from the opera canon. Using this example, we argue that DEI nor antiracism are stable political or theoretical frameworks for music scholars pursuing Black liberation.
This essay serves as a meditation on the final chapter of Philip Ewell's On Music Theory, "Outro: On a Path Forward and Music Theory's Future." After disclosing my own perspective as a junior scholar of color, I highlight a selection of the author's suggestions for "making music theory more welcoming for everyone" - the subtitle of this book. Citing Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels, I analyze on the suggestions, and the book more broadly, through a classed-based lens, and offer more thoughts on what inclusion in music studies can look like, in dialogue with Ewell's own cadenza.
