In The Prison, Smyth uses the symphonic medium as a venue for the subversive retelling of a personally significant narrative. Smyth’s compositional and textual decisions reveal aspects of her ideological conception of the woman’s voice.

In Black, Brown & Beige, Ellington composes, revises, and recasts his longest work over a 30-year period, making structural changes in order to engender more positive reception and intelligibility after its early panning in the press.

In this colloquium, I’ll introduce the central themes of the book before presenting two case studies.

We’ll examine form, narrative, and reception in Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown & Beige and Ethel Smyth’s The Prison, both of which employ symphonic techniques mixed with other genre signifiers.

Come on over, we have snacks!

Macaroni (aka Big Mac) wants to know how handsome he is

Enigma (2019), movement 3, performed by Spektral Quartet in 2020

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cojb...

Spectra (2017) performed by International Contemporary Ensemble in 2018

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlJG...

And I encourage you to check out Thorvaldsdottir's composer website! My paper considers two of her string chamber works:

Spectra, for string trio (2017) and Enigma, for string quartet (2019)

www.annathorvalds.com

This paper analyzes string chamber works of the last half century to examine contemporary relationships
between chamber music and the natural world.

I focus on the music of Anna Thorvaldsdottir, who describes much of her recent music as "as an ecosystem of materials."

Read the abstract here:

The chapter relies heavily on scholarship by Jeffrey Green (a biographer of SCT) and doctoral dissertations by Catherine Carr (Durham U) and Jewel Taylor Thompson (U of Rochester).

Also, Benedict Taylor's book on the Hiawatha trilogy in the Oxford Keynotes series comes out later this summer!

Here's a direct link to that chapter: academic.oup.com/book/59824/c...

Happy to share a PDF, if you're interested!

Thanks Erin!

My chapter on Hiawatha's Wedding Feast considers how different views of the work's form allow for shifts in interpretive perspective. By analyzing the symphonic form-functional qualities of the work, I propose that it can be read as an interracial critique of the act of spectatorship.