Abstracts

Contents

"Metric Dissonance in Brahms' Intermezzo Op. 119, No. 1" by Geoff Wilson
"Clara Schumann, The (Wo)Man and her Music: An Examination of Nineteenth Century Female Virtuosity" by Jennifer Caines
"Songs Without Words: Text and Interpretation in Franz Liszt's Transcriptions of Schubert's Lieder" by Charles Madsen
"J. S. Bach and the two versions of Fantasia super Komm, Heiliger Geist Herre Gott BWV 651a and 651: Which came first?" by Nancy Kern
"Musical Chinoiserie: Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century European Musical Representations of China" by Hayoung Heidi Lee
"Retroactive Cymbals: Turkish Traces in Mozart's Theme and Variations, K. 331" by Jill T. Brasky
"Don Giovanni: Mozart's Catholic and Masonic Opera" by Robyn Cathcart and Lindsay Moore
"Riding the Valkyrie: (En)Countering Wagner in Ingeborg von Bronsart's Hiarne (1891)" by Melinda Boyd
"Determinism and Humanity in Alban Berg's Wozzeck"Hiarne (1891)" by Gwynn Kuhner Brown
"Time Management with "Twelve-Tone Lizzie:" A Scene from Elisabeth Lutyens's The Numbered" by Laurel Parsons
"Music as Fantasy: Lynch, Zizek and Lacan on The Lost Highway" by Gene Willet
"Who Wants to Practice? Relationships Between Gender, Self-Determination, and Motivation" by Cherilee Wadsworth Walker
"At home in Exile: The Conservatoire Am�ricain de Fontainebleau's American Exile During the Second World War" by Kendra Preston Leonard
"The Portsmouth Sinfonia Revisited: The Aesthetic and Social Implications of 'The World's Worst Orchestra'" by Eric Hing-Tao Hung

Session 1: The Romantic Era
Friday 12 October 4:00-5:30 pm

"Metric Dissonance in Brahms' Intermezzo Op. 119, No. 1"
Geoff Wilson, University of British Columbia

In traditional approaches to analysis, considerations of pitch relationships far outweigh those given to metric organization. These pitch relationships are considered primary in defining form, whether presented as harmonic analysis, Schenkerian graph or PC sets. Meter and rhythm on the other hand, are treated as secondary at best, and generally ignored by these methods. By ignoring the contribution of meter to the process of formal perception, analysts run the risk of missing essential aspects of the piece in question. Most often, this happens when remarkable sections of music are explained by traditional analysis as a surface phenomenon underpinned by a traditional and straightforward harmonic skeleton.

Brahms' Intermezzo in B minor Op. 119, no. 1 is a good example of the kind of piece I have in mind. The opening four bars of the Intermezzo are usually dismissed as a circle of fifths progression in B minor, disguised by its novel presentation as a series of descending thirds. This explanation, while accurate, utterly fails to capture the magic of these bars because it fails to appreciate the dissonance that underlies them. The dissonance is not harmonic; indeed, it would be hard to imagine a more consonant collection of pitches. It is a dissonance of meter, or more properly, of an implied meter exposed in the first two bars of the piece. The first bar projects the notated time signature 3/8 clearly, with an emphasis on beat two, which is immediately contradicted by an implied duple division (6/16) in the second bar. Bar 3 continues this duple division before changes in bar 4 intimate a return to the notated meter, this time with a more secure beat two accent.

This metric dissonance recurs and is developed throughout the piece in several interesting ways. It leads to several hemiolas and culminates in the displacement of the barline in the B section before resolving in a metric "recapitulation" that accompanies the return of the opening bars. It ultimately defines a rounded binary form for the piece which is in direct conflict with the ternary shape suggested by the harmonic structure. This is merely one instance of the 3 vs. 2 dissonance initiated by the metric organization of the opening measures discussed above. My analysis makes use of an analogy between metric and harmonic organization to show the effect of the metric dissonance on our perception of the form of the work. I ultimately argue that harmonic and metric analysis are complementary, and that to view one without consideration of the other is a mistake.

Geoff Wilson is in the second year of doctoral studies at UBC, with a focus on the late ninteenth century. His primary area of interest is music of Debussy and its relationship to Symbolist poetry. Other interests include analysis of all kinds and music's role in nineteenth-century philosophical systems.

"Clara Schumann, The (Wo)Man and her Music: An Examination of Nineteenth Century Female Virtuosity"
Jennifer Caines, University of Alberta

In an age when female musicians were often discouraged from a performance career due to considerations of bodily display and respectability, prominent music critic Eduard Hanslick consistently referred to Clara Schumann's masculine tendencies as a performer. Current scholar Judith Bulter's theory of gender as a performative act enlightens modern and nineteenth-century sources, in that, although Clara Schumann was gendered female she performed in a manner associated with societal notions of male comportment. This characterization as male made Clara Schumann's critically and financially successful career more acceptable by societal standards. Considering Clara Schumann's father and only teacher Friedrich Wieck engineered and limited her education to skills she would require in the profession of a concertizing musician, this educational streaming corroborates these masculine references found in concert reviews later in her career. In no manner was her education common for a German woman of the 1830's. Instruction in cooking, housekeeping and other habitual female roles were neglected in order to focus on accepted areas of study for men, such as composition, counterpoint, and the study of French and English, which Clara required for international tours. Comparing a concert review written by Clara's contemporary Franz Liszt with one of Hanslick's foregrounds the differing attitudes toward female performers found in society; Liszt is dismissive, while Hanslick appears more accepting. Examining these differing reviews provides a hypothesis regarding women performers' approach to virtuosity.

Jennifer Caines began her studies at Mount Allison University in a general Bachelor of Music program. She recently completed her MA thesis in Music Criticism at McMaster University entitled Clara Schumann: The (Wo)Man and her Music, an Examination of Nineteenth-Century Female Virtuosity. Currently she attends University of Alberta where she has begun a PhD program in Musicology focusing on female performers in Victorian England.

"Songs Without Words: Text and Interpretation in Franz Liszt's Transcriptions of Schubert's Lieder"
Charles Madsen, University of Oregon

Franz Liszt's piano transcriptions of Schubert lieder contain additions which represent a new interpretive layer superimposed upon the original song. On a fundamental level the original identity of these works is called into question with the removal of the poetic text in performance as works for solo piano. The poetic text of any lied is, of course, at least as important as its musical setting. Liszt was very concerned with this aspect of the song in his transcriptions and insisted that the text be printed above the notes in the solo piano score. Nevertheless, the direct communication of concrete images and ideas was lost to any listener who did not already know the original work or who was not following a printed score. Liszt's pianistic adaptations of the songs represent a new projection of the poetic material which ranges from literal fidelity to Schubert's original intentions to a fundamental reinterpretation of the original.

In the adaptation of these works for solo piano Liszt added both written performance instructions into the score and at times changed the actual musical substance. These musical changes most frequently involved changes of texture, registration and the addition of pianistic figurations. Analysis and evaluation of these added elements with respect to the original poetic text and its setting by Schubert indicates two broad categories of interpretative choice made by Liszt. In the first category the changes made by Liszt can be seen to support or reinforce Schubert's original conception. In this case any elements added by Liszt can be explained by the demands of the work's new incarnation as a solo piano work. In the second category Liszt's reinterpretation of the work reflects an essentially different or modified view of the original text. With these transcriptions the projection of the work as a solo piano piece takes precedence over complete fidelity to the original song.

Through analysis and evaluation of the changes Liszt made in his transcription of Schubert's Lieder, insight into Liszt's compositional style and aesthetic world is gained.

Session 2: Music in the Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Centuries
Saturday 13 October 9:00-11:30 am

"J. S. Bach and the two versions of Fantasia super Komm, Heiliger Geist Herre Gott BWV 651a and 651: Which came first?"
Nancy Kern, University of Washington

There has been considerable investigation into the dates of the two versions of Bach's chorale fantasia. The most obvious difference between the two versions is the length, 651a being 48 measures, and 651 being 106 measures. Establishment of rough dates of composition, or at least the period in Bach's life when these pieces were written, would shed more light on Bach's compositional process, and possibly offer more detail regarding Bach's use and re-use of his own material.

Some scholars consider the shorter version (651a) to be a later abridgement by a copyist. Peter Williams postulates a lost longer version, written during Bach's years at Weimar (1708-1717). He considers the two surviving versions to be contemporaries. Edouard Nies-Berger writes "it seems doubtful that Bach himself extended this piece from 48mm. in the autograph of 18 Chorales to 106mm." He also says "�no other circumstances are known where Bach would cut a melody like this." Hans Klotz thinks the short version is the original and the longer version is a Leipzig revision. He finds the differences similar to other chorales written in Weimar and revised in Leipzig. Werner Breig also thinks the longer version is a Leipzig revision.

Evidence within the opening theme, the controversy over the so-called secondary "Hallelujah" theme, and evidence in Bach's Cantata 172, demonstrating Bach's truncation of a chorale melody and pointing to the curious case of measure 39 in Bach's chorale fantasia, all support the idea that Bach originally wrote 651a during his Weimar years, and then later revised and lengthened the piece in Leipzig.

Nancy Kern is Music Director at Christ Episcopal Church in Seattle, Washington. She completed a Master's in Organ Performance at the University of Washington School of Music in the spring of 2001. A recipient of the Kiwani's Scholarship for Education in Music and Art, Nancy has performed in the Seattle area at St. Mark's Cathedral, First Presbyterian Church of Bellevue, and University Temple United Methodist, among other places. She has studied with Dr. J. Melvin Butler, Choirmaster/Organist at St. Mark's, and Dr. Carole Terry, Professor of Organ and Harpsichord at the University of Washington.

"Musical Chinoiserie: Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century European Musical Representations of China"
Hayoung Heidi Lee, University of Washington

This paper explores 18^th- and early 19^th-century European musical compositions that attempt to depict China in order to understand European perceptions of China at that time and their representation in music. While musicological interest of non-European representation in 18^th-century music has dealt mainly with Turkey (i.e. alla turca style), this study has identified over 80 works that make specific references to China.

Composers of the mid 18^th century did not attempt to imitate authentic Chinese music in their symphonies and operas; rather, they superficially evoked the 'exotic' China through titles, settings, and characters. For his opera Le Cinesi , Christoph Willibald Gluck for example chose a Chinese setting and characters, but his melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic structures reflect 18^th-century European conventions, far from an actual Chinese music. Despite this, Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf noted in 1754 that the performance of Le Cinesi was in a "Chinese style" simply because of elaborate stage decorations and the "brilliant" sound of percussion instruments. Composers of instrumental music, such as the little-known Dutch composer Simoni dall Croubelis, used instrumentation as well as melodic, harmonic, and formal constructions which deviate from 18th-century conventions, in order to convey musical distance from the European norm. It is only in the early 19^th century when other composers, particularly Carl Maria von Weber, quoted an actual Chinese melody in his Musik zu Turandot, and assimilated it into European musical contexts. This paper discusses that despite the differing means of representation, what these composers render is not an authentic China; instead, by use of relatively unspecific "exotic" musical topics, they portray China as a generalized non-European "Other."

Heidi Lee received a Masters of Arts in Music History at the University of Washington in August 2001. She is currently teaches at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington.

"Retroactive Cymbals: Turkish Traces in Mozart's Theme and Variations, K. 331"
Jill T. Brasky, University of Wisconsin

Gertrude Stein might have written about the first-movement theme of Mozart's K. 331 Piano Sonata in A Major that it may not sound Turkish�but it will. This paper approaches the often neglected variations as a lens through which the much analyzed classically Viennese theme is viewed: the variations are saturated with the cymbal crashes and triangle pings of "Turkishness" that appear as "a leaping melody, a static bass with drum-like reiterated notes, odd, dissonant chromatic touches in the melody, and swirling, percussive ornamentation in the form of grace notes, trills, and turns". My lens is further magnified by what Derrida, Steiner, and others have described as a trace-replacing one word, phrase, or idea with another, an act that retains the traits and essence of the other choices. Traces result in the intimate self-referentiality one expects from theme and variations movements. In particular, it is just as fruitful to discuss a variations movement in not just one direction (i.e. chronologically, which so often results in variations considered only as an embellishment of their theme), but in the two directions suggested by Derrida's theory-an approach that complements recent work by Mark Bonds and Elaine Sisman. Thus, while it is possible to suggest that nascent Turkish elements in the theme are brought out in the variations, it is much more interesting to observe how the Turkish traits of these variations leave their traces in the theme. In other words: the theme varies the variations, while the variation varies the theme.

Jill Brasky is Ph.D. Candidate in Music Theory at The University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has given presentations at various regional music theory conferences, as well as the Oxford Music Analysis Conference (OxMAC) in 2000.

"Don Giovanni: Mozart's Catholic and Masonic Opera"
Robyn Cathcart and Lindsay Moore, University of Victoria

Despite having been a devout Roman Catholic from birth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart elected to join a Masonic Lodge and become a Freemason in December 1784. During his lifetime, Mozart was forced to reconcile his Catholicism and Freemasonry within himself, despite the contradictory belief systems. Mozart reconciled his two dogmatic systems externally through his music, and his opera, Don Giovanni (1787), exhibits the synthesis of Mozart's Catholic and Masonic beliefs.

This joint presentation will examine the Catholic and Masonic musical ideas, aspects of the libretto, themes and plot of Don Giovanni. From the Catholic nature of the plot and Mozart's use of the "Cathedral" effect in the music, to the Masonic numerological nuances in the libretto and the use of the "Masonic tonic" in the first four measures of the Overture, there are many examples of how Mozart's two belief systems are assimilated in this opera. Just as Mozart's

Catholicism was an important facet of his early life, so too was his status as a Freemason a significant aspect of his late life, and it is evident from this study that his opera, Don Giovanni, is a synthesis of his dual Catholic and Masonic dogmas.

Robyn Vaughn Cathcart is currently pursuing a master's degree in musicology at the University of Victoria, while also studying voice. Prior to his arrival on the West Coast, Robyn received a B.Mus (voice) at Mount Allison University. He was awarded the Pacific Opera Victoria's Dr. Erica Kurth Young Artists Scholarship in 2000 and the St. Luke's Church Choral Bursary in 2001/2002. Robyn has also received an Excellence in Teaching Award from the University of Victoria, for his work as a Teaching Assistant for the past two years.

Lindsay Moore received her B.Mus. from McMaster University in May 2000, and she is currently enrolled as a M.A. candidate in Musicology at the University of Victoria. Lindsay is presently working on her thesis on Robert Schumann's mental health and his Lieder. She also

has papers pending publication in the student journal Fermata and in the World Association for Symphonic Bands and Ensembles Journal.

Session 3: Opera and Film in Modern and Post-Modern Times
Saturday 13 October 1:30-3:45 pm

"Riding the Valkyrie: (En)Countering Wagner in Ingeborg von Bronsart's Hiarne (1891)"
Melinda Boyd, University of British Columbia

In a series of reviews published in 1890-91, Paul Simon trumpeted the appearance of Ingeborg von Bronsart's Hiarne, the first German grand opera written by a woman. While praising Bronsart's "energetic, manly strength and daring in the battle-scenes," Simon also noted several striking parallels between Hiarne and Richard Wagner's Ring. Given that Bronsart was a pupil of Liszt and married to Hans von Bronsart (one of the staunchest supporters of the New German school), she was well-acquainted with Wagner and his music. Yet she vehemently denied any influence from Wagner. What Simon could not have known is that, at the first Ring festival in Bayreuth, Bronsart shocked and outraged her Hiarne librettists (Friedrich Bodenstedt and her husband) by agreeing with Eduard Hanslick that the Ring was equivalent to "four days of torture" (vier Martertage).

Overt references to Wagner occur in Act I, where Hiarne sings "Das Lied von der G�tterd�mmerung," and at the conclusion of the opera, when a chorus of Valkyries carry the dead hero and heroine off to Valhalla. In my paper, I will demonstrate that the Wagnerian elements in Hiarne � including the use of "Stabreim" � are confined to specific characters and the libretto, while the formal structures and musical style are indebted to the earlier German Romantic opera tradition of Marschner and Wagner's pre-Ring period. Moreover, I conclude that although these seemingly old-fashioned elements ensured Hiarne's immediate popularity, they eventually diminished the work's aesthetic value, thus contributing to its disappearance from the repertory.

Melinda Boyd is a Doctoral Candidate in Musicology at the University of British Columbia, where she is completing her dissertation, "Opera, or the Doing of Women: The Dramatic Works of Ingeborg von Bronsart (1840-1891)."Melinda has held a SSHRCC Doctoral Fellowship, the Tina and Morris Wagner Foundation Fellowship (UBC), and is the author of the article "Gendered Voices: The Liebesfr�ling Lieder of Robert and Clara Schumann" in 19th-Century Music 23 (Fall 1999).

"Determinism and Humanity in Alban Berg's Wozzeck"
Gwynne Kuhner Brown, University of Washington

Wozzeck represents a significant change of emphasis from its source play, Georg B�chner's Woyzeck. The play is above all a work of social criticism and a call for change, with characters that function primarily as symbols of upper-class brutality and lower-class baseness and despair. The opera manages to be simultaneously more fatalistic in outlook and more compassionate toward its characters. Berg conveys a sense of fatalism through musical determinism, evidenced by the opera's imprisoning forms and the almost compulsive control the composer wields over every element of the work. The play's social class distinctions are muted in the opera by the fact that every character is equally at the mercy of an inscrutable, atonal universe. At the same time, Berg humanizes his characters by deleting lines and scenes from the play that depict them as animalistic or obscene, and by using distinct musical styles and forms that deepen the audience's understanding of the characters as human beings. Wozzeck is no longer B�chner's degraded madman, but a tragic figure: he is both oracle and instrument of inescapable disaster, his hallucinations given prophetic authority by Berg's music. Marie emerges in the opera as an utterly trapped and tremendously sympathetic human being, in great contrast to her crude and cryptic quality in the play. The opera brings order and even a certain beauty to the savage chaos B�chner portrayed--but in creating such a relentlessly deterministic musical universe, Wozzeck also extinguishes the possibility of hope or change.

Gwynne Brown graduated from the University of Puget Sound (Tacoma, WA) in '95 with a Bachelor of Music in piano performance, got her M.M. from Indiana University (Bloomington) in music theory ('97), and is ABD in the music history doctoral program at the University of Washington. She received the Adelyn Peck Leverett Award from the UW last year for the paper she is presenting in Victoria. Brown's main research interest is 20th-century opera. This semester she is visiting assistant professor of music history at the University of Puget Sound. After the new year she resumes TA duties at UW.

"Time Management with 'Twelve-Tone Lizzie:' A Scene from Elisabeth Lutyens's The Numbered"
Laurel Parsons, University of British Columbia

Theorists such as Maury Yeston, Harald Krebs and John Roeder have explored in some detail the concept of meter as a complex of interactions between simultaneously-unfolding temporal streams. Elisabeth Lutyens's 1967 opera "The Numbered" tells the story of a society where the state allots each newborn infant a specific lifespan, and names each child by the number of years they will live. Because its characters are conceived less as individual personalities than as lifespans at various stages of completion, the society portrayed in the opera can similarly be described as "a complex of interactions between simultaneously-unfolding temporal streams." This paper explores the interactions between metric and dramatic design in a scene that takes place at the funeral of a boy named Seven.

Laurel Parsons is a Ph.D. candidate in Music Theory at the University of British Columbia. She is currently writing her dissertation on Elisabeth Lutyens's opera The Numbered. She was the recipient of a 3-year doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. In 1998, she was co-winner of the Canadian University Music Society's George Proctor Prize for her paper on Lutyens's Op. 27 Motet based on text by Ludwig Wittgenstein. This paper was subsequently published in the Canadian University Music Review. Her Masters thesis (also completed at UBC) was a study of text-music relations in Richard Strauss's "Im Abendrot." She also holds an M.A. in English Literature (University of Waterloo), and a B.Mus. in Piano Performance (Wilfrid Laurier University).

"Music as Fantasy: Lynch, Zizek and Lacan on The Lost Highway"
Gene Willet, University of Texas at Austin

David Lynch's Lost Highway has been the subject of various contrasting readings ranging from psychotic, to postmodern, to New Age. Slavoj Zizek argues that all of these readings are problematic in that they don't take Lynch seriously. For Zizek, taking Lynch seriously means reading him through Lacan.

Zizek analyzes the central split in the film�about a third of the way through the movie most of the characters disappear and new characters are introduced�in terms of the Lacanian opposition of reality and fantasy. Through his filmic deployment of this opposition, which at first viewing almost renders the film incoherent, Lynch successfully challenges our "normal sense of reality" where reality and fantasy work together; the relationship is thus not the "normal" vertical one; rather reality and fantasy are separated from each other and presented horizontally. As effective as Zizek's analysis is, it remains limited because he does not take into account the musical score, an element that Lynch himself points to as a key to understanding the film.

In this paper, I take Zizek's reading of the film and extend the split between reality and fantasy to the soundtrack, where the musical score serves as a signifier for the fantasy world. This allows us to pinpoint precisely where the film shifts form one world to the next. The result strengthens Zizek's argument that the film re-orders the relation between reality and fantasy from a vertical to a horizontal plane and understands this horizontality as articulated aurally rather than visually within the film.

Gene Willet originally hails from New Plymouth, Idaho. He received his B.S. in chemistry from The College of Idaho in 1992. After years of being involved in music as an extra-curricular activity, he decided to attend Baylor University in 1995 where he took on full-time music studies. In 1998 Gene received an M.M. in music theory after completing a thesis on romantic irony in Mahler's First Symphony. Currently, he is an Assistant Instructor and Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin where he is researching the relationship between chaos theory and order in music.

Gene is one of the founding members of GAMMA�UT, the graduate music conference at UT. He has presented and performed at various regional and national conferences including the Texas Society of Music Theory and the National Saxophone Alliance. His interests and research topics include MIDI, jazz, saxophone, film music, chaos theory, conducting, and the music of Gustav Mahler.

Session 4: Students and Teachers�Amateurs and Professionals
Saturday, 13 October 4:00-5:30 pm

"Who Wants to Practice? Relationships Between Gender, Self-Determination, and Motivation"
Cherilee Wadsworth Walker, Oklahoma University

The relative oddity of applied instruction, combined with its culmination in an extensive solo performance warrents examination. Additionally, if musical aptitude must be enhanced through effort and persistence to complete the recital, factors which contribute to the motivation for musical achievement must also be considered. The purpose of this study was to conduct an inquiry into the relationships between students' perceptions about their own level of self-determination in private instruction by gender, and whether that influences the amount of individual practice time or their enjoyment of it.

Students were 34 undergraduate music education majors attending a regional university in a Midwestern state, enrolled in both private applied lessons and the departmental weekly recital. A researcher-designed, multiple-choice questionnaire served as the instrument for data collection; completion was voluntary and in no way impacted students' grades for either course. Results suggested that females perceived themselves as having a higher level of self-determination than males; they also reported practicing more than males and enjoying it more. Half of the respondents, both male and female, believed they would practice more if given greater choice in applied literature; furthermore, they indicated that they would practice more if they felt more in control of their musical progress, 58.82% believing that they would enjoy it more.

If musical aptitude must be nurtured through sustained effort over time, applied instructors must therefore not only work on cultivating the technical skills required for the development of musicianship, but also address the cognitive strategies and affective responses essential to sustaining that effort.

Holding degrees from Baldwin Wallace College and Indiana University, Cherilee Wadsworth Walker is a former military musician who has performed throughout Europe, Africa, and the Middle East with United States Navy and NATO Bands. She addressed the Society of Composers, Inc. in 1997 concerning women in military music. Appointed to East Central University (OK), she presented research and clinics at the International Association of Jazz Educators national and state conventions in 1999. Last year, she discussed findings regarding the impact of visiting artists on regional colleges at the Oklahoma Music Educators Association conference. Currently pursuing her doctorate at Oklahoma University, she writes for the International Association for Women in Music and teaches at Illinois Central College.

"At home in Exile: The Conservatoire Am�ricain de Fontainebleau's American Exile During the Second World War"
Kendra Preston Leonard, University of Cincinnati

In September 1939, the last remaining students of the Conservatoire Am�ricain de Fontainebleau's summer idyll of study and performance fled the impending war on the Continent. Determined to keep their extraordinary music school open throughout the war, co-founder Walter Demrosch and the Fontainebleau Alumni Association called upon pianists Robert and Baby Casadesus to preserve its traditions in America. Almost single-handedly these two dedicated teachers continued the Conservatoire Am�ricain in New England, hosting "les plus grands musiciens du moment" each summer until the end of the war. When in 1946 the Casadesuses returned to France, it was with equal zest that they re-established the conservatory in its home at the Palais de Fontainebleau, bringing students, bread, and blankets to the small town.

At the same time as the Casadesuses worked to continue the Conservatoire Am�ricain de Fontainebleau in exile, citizens of Fontainebleau itself worked�often at great personal risk�to save the school's instruments, music, and home from its Nazi occupiers. Music and art was trucked away in wheelbarrows to be sheltered in the homes of Conservatoire Am�ricain supporters, and documents were secured in a hastily constructed hidden room.

New research based on materials from the Conservatoire Am�ricain's restricted archives, the personal papers of students and professors, and the professional correspondence of the school sheds new light on these years of the school whose students have, perhaps more than those from any other institution, shaped the course of twentieth-century music.

Kendra Preston Leonard is currently completing her PhD in Historical Musicology at the University of Cincinnati. She has served as the Editor of Music Research Forum and has reviews published in Notes. Leonard was a student at the Conservatoire Am�ricain de Fontainebleau in 1993.

"The Portsmouth Sinfonia Revisited:

The Aesthetic and Social Implications of 'The World's Worst Orchestra'"
Eric Hing-Tao Hung, Stanford University

The Portsmouth Sinfonia, founded by British composer Gavin Bryars in 1970, is often referred to as the "world's worst orchestra." Based on the philosophy that anyone who takes the group seriously and tries to attend all the rehearsals can join regardless of skill level, the Portsmouth Sinfonia tried to play Classical "Top 40" hits in concert and in recording studios for a decade. Studies of recent British music often mention the Portsmouth Sinfonia; authors often use it as an example of the lighter side of British musical life. There has, however, not been an in-depth study of the implications of the activities of this orchestra.

In this paper, I will first contextualize the activities of the Portsmouth Sinfonia in terms of the goals of the Experimental Music movement in Great Britain. Specifically, I will show that the philosophy of the orchestra is intimately related to the writings and works of Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie and John Cage�the three artists who most strongly influenced the British Experimental Music movement�and to several works written by three Experimental Music composers who were members of the orchestra: Brian Eno, Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman.

Then, I will reexamine the oft-assumed purpose of the Portsmouth Sinfonia: the de-deification of masterworks. As a recent BBC report states, the aim of the orchestra is "to reclaim classical music from the tuxedo-nazis, and place it in the hands of people who loved the music for its own sake." Here, I argue that the orchestra�by attempting to play masterworks as well as its members can�not only failed to demystify the canon, but rather served to deify it even further.