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Monash University, Clayton Campus Map

Victoria Chapter
2017 Chapter Conference

Friday 6 October 2017

Seminar Room 2 (Room G24),
21 Sports Walk (Building 89),
Monash University, Clayton Campus
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Programme
MSA Victoria Chapter
10.30–10.55 Registration (tea and coffee provided) Annual General Meeting
10.55–11.00 Welcome (Jonathan McIntosh) 16.15 Friday 6 October 2017
Seminar Room 2 (Room G24), 21 Sports Walk (Building 89),
11.00–13.00 Session 1 (4 papers) Monash University, Clayton Campus

13.00–13.45 Lunch ($20 for university staff; $10 for everyone else) Agenda

13.45–15.45 Session 2 (4 papers) 1. Attendance and apologies

15.45–16.15 Afternoon tea (tea, coffee and eats provided) 2. Minutes of the last AGM (2016)

16.15–16.45 AGM and awarding of the student prize 3. Business arising from the minutes

16.45–18.00 Drinks at Monash Club 4. Reports:

a. President’s Report
b. Treasurer’s Report

5. Election of Chapter Committee

MSA Victoria Chapter
2016–2017 Committee 6. Motions of Appreciation

President: Jonathan McIntosh 7. Any Other Business

Treasurer: Peter Campbell
Secretary: Paul Watt
Events: Joel Crotty
Newsletter Editor: Kate Sullivan / Robert J. Stove
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15.15
Stanford’s War: Organ Music and the Irish Question, 1916-1918
Robert J. Stove
Honours Candidate, Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music, Monash University
During World War I, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (all his symphonies and
most of his big choral works being by this stage behind him) produced five
organ sonatas, which in many respects are the British equivalent to
Charles-Marie Widor’s organ symphonies. (Widor is in fact the dedicatee of
one of them, the Sonata Eroica.) This paper will examine the Sonata
Celtica, which Stanford wrote in the aftermath of modern Irish history’s
single most dramatic event: the 1916 Easter Rising and its suppression.
The tug of divided loyalties which Stanford felt over this uprising, as an
outsider twice over––by birth a Protestant in Catholic Dublin, by adoption an
Irishman in London and Cambridge––may be imagined; but scarcely any
commentators on Stanford have bothered with connecting the Sonata
Celtica to the fratricidal passions that then raged on Irish soil, and that after
Ireland’s independence would culminate in a hideous civil war. Nonetheless,
the clues are there, not least the finale’s inspired use of the heroic Irish
hymn-tune St Patrick’s Breastplate.
stoverobertjames@gmail.com
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Session 1: Meaning, Transcription and Reception
11.00
Performance, Meaning, and Reality in a Seventeenth-Century
Singspiel: Duchess Sophie Elisabeth’s Glückwünschende
Freudendarstellung (1652)
Hannah Spracklan-Holl
MMus Candidate, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of
Melbourne
Seventeenth-century court festivities, highly symbolic means of asserting
political authority in the German-speaking lands, often marked important
occasions such as a wedding or the birthday of a ruler. At the ducal court of
Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, these festivities took the form of processions,
banquets, drama, ballet and Singspiele, and contributed to the growing
reputation of this court as a cultural centre, especially in the aftermath of the
Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). From 1652 to 1656, Singspiele were a
prominent form of festivity at Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel; several of these
works were written by Duchess Sophie Elisabeth (1613-1676), a musician
and composer, to celebrate the birthday of her husband Duke August.
Sophie Elisabeth’s compositions for these festivities, allegorical music-
dramas, occupy a unique position as works composed by the spouse of a
ruler, rather than by a composer working under noble patronage. As such,
they bear witness both to local artistic circumstances of court life at
Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel in the mid-seventeenth century as well as to the
cultural activities of early modern German noblewomen. This paper offers a
critical reading of the surviving sources from Sophie Elisabeth’s Singspiel of
1652, Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung, focusing on the problem of
analysing and inferring meaning from the scholarly imagination of its
performance. Theories of performativity outlined by Judith Butler, Nicholas
Cook, and Lydia Goehr provide a framework for an examination of the text,
music and staging (suggested by its accompanying illustrations) of
Glückwünschende Freudendarstellung. Together, these inform my
interpretation of the Singspiel as a discrete representation of court life at
mid-seventeenth-century Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel in which performance,
meaning, and reality intersect.
hannahsh@student.unimelb.edu.au
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11.30
Pablo Sarasate: Spanish Dances Folk Influences and Flute
Transcription
Beatriz Pomés Jiménaz
PhD Candidate, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of
Melbourne
My PhD dissertation examines the contexts and sources from which Pablo
Sarasate’s folk-inspired compositions were created. Throughout the
nineteenth century, the folk music was a source of musical inspiration for
many nations, and this was particularly true of Spain. Numerous composers
showed interest in so-called Spanish elements, resulting in a rich corpus of
works, which were well received both nationally and internationally. Pablo
Sarasate (1844-1908) was one of these composers, producing a great
number of Spanish Dances for the violin, drawn from a variety of different
regional song and dance styles, including jotas, zapateados, zortzicos, vitos
or habaneras. My study also examines, from theoretical and performance
perspectives, the suitability of these pieces for adaptation into the flute
repertoire. Despite their differences, the violin and flute are two instruments
that share multiple characteristics, such as their technical agility and
melodic brightness. As a consequence, it has not been uncommon for
flautists and composers to borrow and arrange violin compositions, in order
to enrich the flute’s repertoire and gain access to new styles and
possibilities. Finally, by adopting practice-based approach, this dissertation
has led to the transcription for flute and piano of eight Spanish Dances by
Pablo Sarasate, that will be published in Spain by Dasí Flauta Editorial in
November 2017. These new showpieces for flute will make a unique and
exciting addition to the flute’s repertoire, exploring and extending the
qualities that flautists today associate with the much-loved French Flute
School.
blaknok@hotmail.com
14.45
How Participation in the Moonrise Rock Festival Contributes to
Wellbeing in Derby, Western Australia
Brigitta Scarfe
MA Candidate, Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music, Monash University
This paper draws upon research that investigates how the Moonrise Rock
Festival, a long-running music festival in the West Kimberley town of Derby,
Western Australia (WA), contributes to individual, social and cultural
wellbeing in the local community. Hosted by a community comprising
multiple Indigenous language and family groups from across the Kimberley
region, the festival offers a unique case study to examine the intersections
between these groups, as well as an opportunity to examine how musicians
and audience members construct a sense of self and belonging through
performance. The Moonrise Rock Festival also provides a platform for
musicians and audience members to legitimise, perform and symbolically
negotiate concerns relevant to their everyday lives. One such concern that
features consistently in songs performed at the festival over the past two
decades is relationships with ancestral country. These songs are informed
by complex histories of removal and resettlement, and, as such, are laden
with expressions of longing, nostalgia, and an overwhelming appeal to
‘return home’ to ancestral countries that are often distant and difficult to
access. The presentation builds on existing research examining community
music initiatives in rural and remote Australia and highlights how such
programs serve to improve various aspects of wellbeing. However, few
studies investigate festivals or popular music practices in the remote
Kimberley region. Through semi-structured interviews and collaborative
textual analysis, this research aims to privilege local knowledge surrounding
music, health and identity construction, and, in so doing, provide new
insights into how a marginalised community combats adversity and instils
hope in the next generation.
brigitta.scarfe1@monash.edu
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14.15
She-Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: Baroque Opera’s Villainesses and their
Powers of Seduction Through Music
Kate Macfarlane
PhD Candidate, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of
Melbourne
Opera’s villains are invariably gifted with some of the repertoire’s most
sublime and powerful music. One need only think of the Queen of the
Night’s two magnificent arias, Iago’s Credo, Scarpia’s Te Deum, or
Claggart’s O Beauty, O Handsomeness, to realise that the power of the
villain is not only to repulse, but also to seduce. The precedent in music
theatre for the antagonist to concurrently allure and repel stems from the
very beginnings of opera. Women in seventeenth-century opera were
overwhelmingly charged with representing the moral values of the time, and
this paper asserts that the sorceress/anti-heroine characters in Francesca
Caccini’s La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall’Isola di Alcina and Francesco
Cavalli’s Il Giasone are invested with the power of seduction through
musical devices, thus highlighting their moral treachery. A combination of
historical research, musical analysis and cultural critique will be used to
demonstrate the composers’ intentions to create music that elevated the
characters’ dramatic discourse, thereby fulfilling the aesthetic aims of the
period.
macfarlanek@student.unimelb.edu.au
12.00
‘A souvenir de Bedlam’: The Reception of Non-Western Musics at the
London International Exhibitions of 1884 & 1885
Catherine Sarah Kirby
PhD Candidate, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of
Melbourne
In the many themed International Exhibitions held in London in the 1880s,
music formed one of the chief entertainments. These events, intended to
demonstrate the comparative development of art and industry across the
world, at times made a prominent feature of the performance of non-
Western music. At the ‘Health’ Exhibition of 1884—an event relating mainly
to food—a band of Chinese musicians performed daily within a Chinese
restaurant and tea garden established within the Exhibition building. The
following year, at the ‘Inventions’ Exhibitions, the Court Band of the King of
Siam performed regularly at the Royal Albert Hall. These performances
were largely viewed as curiosities by the press and public, yet they also
allowed for sonic engagement with both Chinese and Siamese musical
traditions in real terms. For the broader British public, with musical
expectations framed through an imagined European exoticism, these
concerts were possibly their first encounters with the realities of any non-
Western music. Yet these concerts also were highly curated with a Western
audience and their expectations in mind. In this paper, I explore the striking
differences in the reception of these bands in the British press: where the
Chinese music was described as ‘horrible, barbarous, deafening, and
meaningless’, the Siamese music, while ‘singular in the extreme’ was
considered ‘by no means unpleasing’. I argue that this reception was
influenced not by the musical qualities of the performances, but by wider
British social hierarchies, drawing on the David Cannadine’s work in
Ornamentalism. While the British may have sometimes conceptualised
these hierarchies was ‘in racial terms of superiority and inferiority’, more
important to their own social structure was ‘a carefully graded hierarchy of
status’. As such, the royal association of the Siamese band influenced the
reception of their music in ways beyond simple developmentalist
constructions of their music as ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’, as the Chinese band
had been termed a year earlier.
c.kirby@student.unimelb.edu.au
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Session 2: Teaching and Performance, Participation and Politics

12.30 13.45

The Curious Case of Chui Chai Benjakai ‘Us’ verses ‘Them’: Tertiary Musicology Teaching in Australia

John Garzoli Megan Burslem

Adjust Research Associate, Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music, Monash PhD Candidate, Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music, Monash University
University
Every student who studies undergraduate music in Australia will experience
The 2009 Album World Jazz Jam 2 involved a collaboration between a musicology unit, course or program. But what exactly is musicology?
musicians from the Thai ‘classical’ tradition and European jazz musicians. What is being taught in our musicology classes and why? Through
The album contains a recording of the song ‘Chui Chai Benjakai’ that interviews, participation, observation and personal experience, this paper
normally accompanies the dance of transformation in khon theatre, which is examines the presentation of undergraduate musicology education in
recognised as the highest of the dramatic arts. The version on World Jazz Australian tertiary institutions. Such an ethnographic approach has
Jam 2 combines the tuning system, instruments and stylistic practices generated unique insights, and, in this paper, I pose a series of questions
associated with traditional sacred piphat performance with instruments, that outline the state of undergraduate musicology education in 21st century
musical structures, performance practices and ideas about improvisation Australia. The purpose of this paper is not to propose changes to
associated with jazz. The recording demonstrates aesthetic, structural and musicology education, but rather to offer a series of observations pertaining
other theoretical complexities involved in the creation and interpretation of to the teaching and learning of the discipline in order to gauge pathways for
music that combines elements and traits from disparate musical and cultural progression, possible future directions, as well as to maintain relevance in
systems, and poses significant questions about musical fusion. This paper an ever-changing broader music industry.
clarifies processes involved in intercultural musical synthesis by considering
the relationship between sounding and non-sounding elements of ‘music’. megan.burslem@monash.edu
This allows its disaggregation, and the delineation of its discrete traits and
elements into the relevant theoretical categories of tuning and intonation,
stylistic idiom and cultural ontology. The analysis shows that performers
confront significant obstacles when combining musical systems which share
no common notes, are underpinned by different stylistic and aesthetic
ideals, and play fundamentally different cultural roles in the societies where
they circulate. These obstacles cannot be overcome by drawing upon the
conventional thinking and orthodox practices associated with these
separate musics because their related aesthetic and structural foundations,
which shape musicians thinking and to which they defer, are completely
silent on how to incorporate incompatible elements from outside their own
stylistic and generic orbit.

john.garzoli@monash.edu

13.00–13.45
Lunch