Beethoven Papers Read at the 1990 AMS/SEM/SMT Meeting

The American Musicological Society, Society for Enthnomusicology, and Society for Music Theory held their annual meetings together this year in Oakland, California from November 7-11. As one might anticipate from this admixture of societies (each of which boasts its own unique corporate personality) and place (Oakland, California, which similarly has its own particular if mutable character), it was a lively and at times startling gathering, reflecting many of the new directions in critical thinking about what music is, what it means, and how it is put together. If the cross-fertilizing of ideas from three disparate groups produced unexpected progeny on occasion, it can nonetheless be concluded that the scope of discourse on music had - at least for four days been stretched considerably beyond its normal predictable boundaries. Five papers devoted to were presented at the meeting. Friday morning Douglas Johnson (Rutgers University), one of the deans of American scholarship, chaired a valuable AMS session entitled Received. Carol Bailey Hughes (Southern Methodist University) discussed Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevskii (1804-69) and his embrace of Beethoven in an important study which placed Odoevskii's Russian Nights (which contains the short story Last Quartet) in the continuum of Russian music-novels from the first half of the nineteenth century. (Dr. Hughes' translation of the story appeared in the summer 1989 issue of this newsletter. ) She summarized Odoevskii's journalistic activity, analyzed his four-fold credo of science-love-art-faith in relation to Beethoven, and reviewed Odoevskii's contribution to the reception of Beethoven's music in Russia during the first half of the nineteenth century. In his and the sounds that didn't have, Geoffrey Block (University of Puget Sound) creatively analyzed Ives's Concord Sonata in the light of its quotations of Beethoven's music. Therein heargued that Although Ives revered as the 'best product that human beings can boast of and a composer worthy of eulogizing in a work as central to his output as Concord Sonata, he also conveyed feelings of pronounced ambivalence towards his spiritual musical father. In fact, there is considerable evidence that Ives viewed himself as the legitimate heir to and a modern composer who more than any other had accomplished 'what would have done had he been able to keep on living.' Block discussed Ives's teenage arrangement of Beethoven's Fortepiano Sonata, Opus 2, no. 1, for string quartet; the symbolic use of Unitarian hymns in the Concord Sonata, and Ives' reference to the Hammerklavier Sonata in the Alcotts movement. Anne Stone (Harvard University) read her densely analytical and meticulous study of A model for an early twelve-tone work by Schoenberg, convincingly demonstrating that the Finale of Schoenberg's Wind Quintet, Opus 26, is modelled on the rondo finale of Beethoven's String Quartet, Opus 18, no. 4. The clue to this relationship came from Schoenberg's son-in-law, Felix Greissle, who related that Schoenberg told me that the form of the last movement of the wind quintet had a model. …