IU’s musicology department investigates the forces that drive the music we love.
By Ryan Piurek

From left: Cheryl Zukowski, Jeffrey Magee, Joanna Biermann, and Ayana Smith. Photo by Sam Scott

Musicologists at the IU School of Music are making sense of the questions that have confounded music lovers for many centuries.

They’re at the forefront of research in areas that range from the music of ancient Greece to American jazz, from Monteverdi to Bach, Chopin, Debussy, and Ives. They’re informing the performances of some of the world’s greatest pedagogues and providing students with a greater appreciation of music history and the traditions they seek to uphold. They’re actively engaging other departments and centers within the university, including the Russian and East European Institute, Early Music Institute, Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature, Ethnomusicology Institute, and the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.

Behind our favorite pieces of music lie questions that should fascinate even the most casual music lovers, says Peter Burkholder, professor of musicology. Burkholder’s own interests include twentieth-century music, American composer Charles Ives, and musical borrowing.

Burkholder is one of several IU musicologists who seek to contextualize classic pieces of music, explore what it means to listen to these pieces today, and understand the cultural and political forces that make them so well-loved and influential. In that regard, he believes that the musicologist’s role is not unlike that of a historian, scientist, or archaeologist.

“If you already care about music, whether it’s classical, pop, or jazz, then it makes sense to try to understand it a lot better,” Burkholder says. “And even if you don’t care about the actual pieces we’re studying, you can still make the argument that it’s important to understand how the past affected the present. Why is there such a large gulf between classical and popular music? There have to be historical reasons behind it.”

Halina Goldberg Photo by Wolodymyr Smishkewych

“Musicology is, at its heart, an interdisciplinary discipline,” says Halina Goldberg, an assistant professor of musicology who specializes in Frédéric Chopin and the music of Poland and Eastern Europe. She is the editor of a multi-disciplinary collection of essays on Chopin (published last year by IU Press) and author of a forthcoming book with Oxford University Press about the piano composer’s formative years in Warsaw, Poland. “We [musicologists] work with music, but we may come at it from the perspective of philosophy or sociology or cultural studies and so on. There are very different ways of approaching music study.”

Ayana Smith, a new visiting professor in the musicology department, said she is astounded by the range of music topics covered by her colleagues and the cross-departmental opportunities for students and faculty. “Musicology can have so many different faces,” she says.

History in the (re)making

Peter Burkholder Photo by Sam Scott

Peter Burkholder is rewriting history—literally—as he revises Donald Grout and Claude Palisca’s seminal textbook, A History of Western Music , which many scholars regard as the finest survey of Western music. Burkholder calls it the “gold standard.” Since its first edition in 1960, the book has influenced how music history has been taught around the world. Although it has also fought off several aggressive competitors in recent years, Burkholder estimates that the book retains about three-quarters of the current market share for music history textbooks.

His undertaking isn’t the typical textbook rewrite in which a few paragraphs are updated and a couple of chapters are tacked onto the end of the book. It is a substantial revision, “from the bottom up,” Burkholder says. “[Publisher] Norton understood that simply dusting this book off wasn’t going to help it keep its market share.”

That’s not to say Burkholder isn’t following the fundamentals of textbook writing. An authority on musical borrowing, the author says (tongue in cheek) that he has “stolen” where he can from previous editions. He has also reorganized much of the existing information and inserted new material on jazz and popular music.

But it’s the addition of three major themes that make this revision so significant. By focusing on history’s leading composers and the choices they made, the tension between musical tradition and innovation, and what performers and audiences have historically valued in music, Burkholder has introduced what he hopes is a more engaging way for students to view and understand music.

“The text was originally set up as a history of musical genres and styles, and that’s important. But while I tried to preserve the things that were very good about the book, I felt it was necessary to change the paradigm by focusing on people and their values,” Burkholder says. “For instance, why does the romantic style replace the classical style? Why does modern music replace the romantic style? How did the sonata form develop? How did it serve the needs or interests of time?”

In the case of Bach

Daniel Melamed Photo by Sam Scott

Historian. Scientist. Archaeologist. Tour guide. Add another role to the musicologist mix: detective. As he investigates the historical impact of Johann Sebastian Bach’s two surviving Passions— St. John and St. Matthew—Daniel Melamed is focused largely on what we know about the way pieces were performed in the composer’s time and how we can use that information today. An associate professor of musicology and director of graduate studies at the IU School of Music, Melamed has been tracing the evidence about how Bach performed these two well-known pieces and how modern presentations differ from those in the composer’s time. Melamed, a Bach scholar who has published several books on the composer, explains that these complex works were written for a particular liturgical event: the telling of the passion story on Good Friday. They were performed by a small instrumental and (all-male) vocal ensemble whose members had many different duties, from singing solo arias to representing characters to combining to form the chorus. Modern listeners have traditionally heard Bach’s passions performed by choruses of 30 to 60 male and female singers and full modern orchestras, with solo singers distinct from the chorus. They have come to expect monumental performances that are powerful and dramatic expressions of religious sentiment.

But this is not necessarily the way the pieces were heard in Bach’s time. In a forthcoming book for general readers, Melamed explores questions and issues raised by Bach’s passion repertory, including matters of performing practice, what happens when multiple versions of a piece of music survive, how we decide exactly who composed a piece, and how one begins the process of reconstructing lost works. “It turns out that we can deduce a great deal about the way Bach performed his own music,” he says. “The challenge comes in deciding how that knowledge can help us understand these works almost 300 years later. It also forces us to confront the way these works have come to be performed today, in practices that owe a great deal to the new choral, orchestral, and solo singing ideals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

“There are no right or wrong ways to perform older musical works, but we would be foolish to ignore what can be learned about them as we make sense of both ancient and modern performances.”

The politics of music

When it comes to music, Jane Fulcher likes to talk politics.

The professor of musicology has made a distinguished career out of exploring the politics of French music and arguing that French musical meanings are best explained in terms of the political culture of the times.

One of Fulcher’s books examined the development of French music from the Dreyfus Affair of 1898, a political scandal that divided French society for many years, to the start of the First World War. She has also written a book about the French Grand Opera, which she contends was not the entrepreneurial enterprise it was believed to have been, but rather an entirely state-run operation. Through her own detective work, which included the study of the opera’s archives in Paris, she learned that the monarchy used the opera to present an image of liberalism and openness that was not always received kindly by audiences.

Fulcher, a trained violinist who studied musicology at Columbia University, takes a step forward in time in her new book, The Composer as Intellectual: Music and Ideology in France, 1914–1940 . To be published this spring, the book considers the political engagement of French composers.

“Composers identified themselves as intellectuals, joining parties and taking part in movements,” she says. “In some cases, we can see their values being projected into their music. Immediately after World War I, many composers had experienced the brainwashing and overly zealous patriotism of that war.”

From left: Thomas Mathiesen and Jane Fulcher Photo by Sam Scott

However, the music of that time didn’t always reflect the composers’ ideologies, Fulcher says. “Very often, something else takes place in the creative process,” she says. “It’s when the unconscious refuses simple answers.”

Musicology meets the computer age

The detective work of musicologists is aided by access to IU’s Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature, which allows researchers to delve into the vast amount of music scholarship that has already been published—including theses, treatises, essays, doctoral dissertations, articles, books, and other print and electronic materials.

Established in 1998 as a joint venture of the IU School of Music, the Office of Research, and the University Graduate School, the center connects various IU music research activities. Located in a narrow hallway in Aydelotte Hall, the center has four full-text databases of treatises on music theory written in Latin, Italian, English, and French. It manages the Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology database, or DDM-Online, which contains bibliographic records of completed dissertations and new dissertation topics in musicology, music theory, and several related fields. And it has launched an annotated bibliography of published materials and theses on musical borrowing, which Burkholder currently edits.

The databases contain writings dating back to the early Middle Ages by some of history’s most influential thinkers, such as René Descartes, Vincenzo Galilei, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. These works provide information about the construction of musical instruments, musical notation, tuning, and other subjects that affect the way early music is performed and recorded. They also contribute to our understanding of music’s cultural, historical, and social significance.

Patterned after the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG), a research center at the University of California, Irvine, established in 1972, the databases have enjoyed considerable success. The IU center’s Latin database, Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML), which opened to the public in 1990, now contains approximately 5.5 million words and more than 4,600 graphics. With a high-speed Internet connection, the site can be combed in a matter of seconds. Funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant of approximately $330,000, TML is accessed more than 2,400 times every month.

DDM-Online contains more than 12,000 records that are fully searchable by author and/or as many as three simultaneous keywords. Since 1996, DDM-Online has responded to more than 5 million searches of its data. A typical month may yield nearly 300,000 searches.

The database has become a major point-of-entry to the IU School of Music, says Thomas Mathiesen, distinguished professor and David H. Jacobs Chair in Music, who directs the center. “It’s really astonishing. I find myself looking at these numbers and asking myself ‘who could be this interested in musicology?’”

Mathiesen and the center’s co-director, Peter Slemon, have the unenviable task of maintaining all of this data as it flows through the center, creating and updating records, and addressing a constant and “voluminous” stream of correspondence from musicologists from around the globe. Mathiesen welcomes the burden, though, and actually anticipates the addition of several more full-text databases.

“I think we’re unique,” Mathiesen says. “We’re certainly the leader in making history of music resources available. No one library would have copies of all of these treatises. Ten years ago, we were in such a rudimentary stage. Now we can do things that even the best of our memories can’t do.”

Musical experiences and connections

Massimo Ossi Photo by Sam Scott

“What distinguishes us is the range of methodologies and the clustering of certain resources around the areas of twentieth-century and baroque music,” says Massimo Ossi, chair of the musicology department, who studies the music and culture of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His recent book, Divining the Oracle: Monteverdi’s Seconda prattica , traces Claudio Monteverdi’s development during the first years of the seventeenth century when the legendary baroque composer found himself at the center of one of the first heated debates about progressive and conservative music.

Jumping forward several hundred years is Jeff Magee, an associate professor of musicology. Magee is one of several IU musicologists whose research interests center on twentieth-century popular music. He recently published a critically-acclaimed book on influential jazz bandleader Fletcher Henderson. Henderson, who Magee calls the “uncrowned king of swing,” ushered in the swing era of the 1930s and 40s and paved the way for better-known jazz luminaries such as Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman. Magee also has written about Broadway music and Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths such as Irving Berlin.

“If you lined all of us up, we’d each represent a very different area. That’s one of the keys to the nature of this department,” Ossi says.

In addition to its core group of faculty members, the lineup features several accomplished visiting professors, including:

• Joanna Biermann, a visiting professor from Germany who specializes in Beethoven, early symphonic music, and music in Nazi Germany. She has conducted research at Beethoven’s birth house in Bonn, Germany, toward the release of a new book, Catalogue of the First and Early Editions of Beethoven in the Collections of the Beethoven-Haus, Bonn . Additionally, she taught a course last fall that examined composer Richard Wagner’s posthumous role in Nazi musical aesthetics and politics. The class included a visit by Wagner’s great-grandson, Gottfried Wagner.
• Robert Green, a visiting professor and professor emeritus at Northern Illinois University, whose interests include French instrumental and vocal music of seventeenth- and
  eighteenth-century France. Green has performed on the hurdy-gurdy—a French traditional and baroque instrument—throughout the United States, France, and Israel. He is the author of The Hurdy-Gurdy in Eighteenth-Century France (Indiana University Press, 1995).
• Ayana Smith, who came to IU last year after receiving her Ph.D. in music history from Yale University. She studies Italian baroque opera and the early folk blues of America during the 1920s and 1930s. Drawing upon her knowledge of Latin, literature, and African American music, Smith has shown that poetry and operatic texts influenced Italian baroque music, just as African American oral traditions informed early folk blues.
• Sheryl Zukowski, a visiting assistant professor, who studies nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music; music and the history of the body; Gustav Mahler’s operatic and orchestral direction; and gesture in performance. Zukowski taught a class last fall on operatic portrayals of “outsiders” and another class that focused on Mahler’s eccentricities and how he arrived at his compositional decisions.

“What we also have—that no other comparable department of musicology has—are strong ties with specialists at the university,” Ossi says.

Ossi hosted a conference at IU on music and eroticism in early modern Europe last spring that included a show of erotic and musical art at the Kinsey Institute. He is currently working on an Antonio Vivaldi opera with Stanley Ritchie, IU professor of violin and director of the IU Early Music Institute’s Baroque Orchestra. The opera will be staged during the Bloomington Early Music Festival, and Ossi and Ritchie expect to draw upon the many Vivaldi resources available at the university’s William and Gayle Cook Music Library and to select several IU Early Music Institute students as performers.

Ritchie says his colleague is adept at uncovering the context in which early music was composed. “He may even uncover an emerging performance fact, and that is always very valuable,” he says. “But this is really for our students’ sake. It’s valuable for them to talk to someone and not just consult a book.”

Looking back and forging ahead

When former department chair A. Peter Brown passed away in 2003, he left behind a high standard for research in the musicology department. A renowned eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music scholar, Brown authored more than 80 published articles and reviews, as well as critical music editions of the works of Franz Joseph Haydn.

IU’s musicologists have joined together to complete Brown’s five-volume magnum opus on the symphony, which explores the symphony from its eighteenth-century beginnings to the end of the twentieth century (the fourth volume—on the second golden age of the Viennese Symphony—was published by IU Press in 2002).

“When he (Brown) passed away, it was tough on everybody, but the department pulled together and everyone contributed to weather the crisis,” Ossi says. “To me, that’s an important part of his legacy—that he left behind a department that really could come together.”

The department’s emeritus faculty remain as active as they were during their full-time teaching days. The group includes internationally renowned musicologists Hans Tichler, Austin Caswell, George Buelow, and Malcolm Brown.

In October 2004, the department co-sponsored with the Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature a “Celebration of Scholarship,” a conference in honor of the 75th birthdays of Malcolm Brown and George Buelow. The event was an opportunity to pay tribute to two men who helped build the department’s stature and to highlight current faculty members’ deep commitment to research and involvement in the music profession. “[The faculty’s] commitment to scholarship and involvement in the profession are exemplary,” Malcolm Brown says. “The range (of research) is extraordinary by any measure and matched by no other faculty known
to me.”

Whether they are providing unprecedented access to a literary treasure trove of music theory, sifting through multiple versions of great composers’ works, or rewriting the history of music for the next generation of scholars, IU’s musicologists are continuing a proud tradition of striving to unearth the answers to music’s most difficult questions. It is this quest for answers that makes their work so interesting.

“If we think of music as just some sort of pure, aesthetic ornament, its relevance is limited,” says Mathiesen. “The sounds just wash over us. The interest comes from knowing there’s something below the surface.”

Behind the Scenes

IU Professor Emeritus of Musicology Malcolm Brown recently shared his memories of several “mythic” personalities who helped shape the IU musicology department: Willi Apel, Ralph Daniel, Walter Kaufmann, and John Reeves White.

Willi Apel Photo IU Archives

On Willi Apel : gravelly voiced, solemn, a man of few words— and those apodictic. In class, he sat at the piano to illustrate whatever pre-1600 music was being discussed, be it Gregorian chant, Renaissance polyphony, or twelfth-century organum, muttering all the while in a distinctive mix of English and German, liberally punctuated by “Ja, ja!” or “Das ist gut!”

Ralph Daniel Photo IU Archives

On Ralph Daniel : My memories will always be colored by a nightmare event associated with the completion of his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation, The Anthem in New England Before 1800 . Ralph had completed it, after a final extended research trip to the British Library, and he and his wife had headed off for a short vacation before returning to Blooming- ton to start the fall semester. All of their luggage, including Ralph’s briefcase with the draft of the dissertation, was loaded into a cab at the Madrid airport, and off they drove to their hotel in town, Ralph’s briefcase by his side on the seat of the cab. At the hotel, while Ralph and Genevieve were waiting for their bags to be unloaded, the briefcase with the dissertation vanished and was never recovered. What a nightmare for a poor A.B.D.! Ralph’s unfailing good humor eventually saved the day; he reconstructed the entire dissertation from his notes, and his edition of the anthems and commentary, when eventually published, won a Pi Kappa Lambda award for publications in American music.

Walter Kaufmann Photo IU Archives

On Walter Kaufmann : amiable and hearty, and also generally at the piano, playing from memory anything from the standard repertory—symphonic, chamber music, operatic—all the while making droll asides. Famous for standing up, turning around suddenly, and plopping his ample rear end down on the keyboard: “That’s twentieth-century music!” I remember when John Reeves White left the department to take over the New York Pro Musica, Walter remarked to him, rather mordently, “Pursued by the hounds of ambition, eh?”

John Reeves White Photo IU Archives

On John Reeves White : He was ever ready with the witty retort, sometimes a tad risqué. At a concert by the Collegium Musicum/ Pro Arte, which John conducted, he responded to a question from the audience about the medieval nun’s fiddle: “Well, it was a type of violin often played by nuns . . . and it sounded like a nun if you fiddled with her.” Equally adept as specialist in Renaissance music, conductor of the IU Pro Arte, and harpsichordist in the IU Baroque Chamber Players, he prepared and conducted the premiere recording of John Eaton’s avant-garde TV opera Myshkin .