First Prize: Marta Beszterda
Prize: $1,000.
Abstract:
This essay is the first chapter from my PhD dissertation titled: “The ‘First Lady’ and the ‘Stalinist Agent’ of Polish Music: The Musical Labour of Grażyna Bacewicz and Zofia Lissa During the Shaping of Contemporary Art Music Culture in Poland (1925–1975).” The dissertation as a whole explores the relationship between gender, identity, musical labor, and women’s agency in mid-century Poland. I focus on lives and careers of two key female figures who shaped the country’s contemporary music culture: composer Grażyna Bacewicz (1909–69) and musicologist Zofia Lissa (1905–80). Throughout their careers, Bacewicz’s and Lissa’s creative, intellectual, administrative, and care-labour depended on, challenged, and reinforced prevailing ideas about gender roles in music and academia in Polish interwar and postwar society. Simultaneously, their lives provide a case study to examine agency that women composers and musicologists exerted with changing politics of gender and national belonging.
In the awarded chapter, I analyze beliefs and practices around womanhood and work ethic shared by Bacewicz, her mother Maria Modlińska, and her teacher Nadia Boulanger. I consider the Warsaw positivism movement provenience of Modlińska’s values around work and womanhood as influential in shaping Bacewicz’s extraordinary dedication and perseverance in pursuing a composing career as a woman. Moreover, I demonstrate parallels between Boulanger’s and Bacewicz’s practices of self-fashioning as an “exceptional woman.” Previous analyses of the Bacewicz-Boulanger relationship have not gone beyond the context of Boulanger’s overall relations with her Polish students and the role that the French mentor played in Polish musical culture more broadly—in particular, how her visits to Warsaw in the fifties and sixties constituted a form of cultural diplomacy in the Cold War era (Bohlman and Pierce 2020). To date, researchers have not considered how the role that Boulanger played for Bacewicz might have differed from the experience of Bacewicz’s male colleagues. Based on my analysis of Bacewicz’s memoir and archival correspondence, I argue that the lineage between the two composers surpasses the boundaries of neoclassical style and of simply being comparably unique figures within their respective milieus. Although it encompasses both of these associations, it is also a lineage that was built on their shared strategy of cultivating “exceptionalism” to survive under the male-dominated status quo. Drawing on feminist approaches by Rachel Lumsden (2017) and Kimberly Francis (2015), this chapter is a case study on women and gender in musical modernism, interwoven with Polish mid-century debates around nation, music, and gender.
Second Prize: Jonathan Lindhorst
Prize $500
Abstarct
First codified in 1982 by queer Dutch composer Peter Schat (1935-2003) and later significantly expanded by New Zealand composer Jenny Mcleod (1941-2022), tone-clocktheory (TCT) is a largely unexplored post-tonal theory that provides a new framework forengaging with the whole of chromaticism. Both a harmonic system and chromatic ‘map,’
TCT presents twelve previously uncategorized ‘chromatic tonalities’ which are derived from the twelve possible atonal triads (Allen Forte’s trichordal set classes), labelled as ‘hours,’ and organized around a circular clock face. Using a transpositional operation called ‘steering,’ these triadic sets can then be expanded to assemble a non-repeating twelve- tone harmonic field based on its interval-class, each with its own distinct ‘harmonic flavour,’ offering innovative approaches for composition and an alternative system of harmonic analysis to
Allen Forte’s pitch-class set theory.
Despite being in existence for more than 40 years, TCT has remained obscure, with few existing texts that clearly outline its functionality while also remaining true to its unique notational nomenclature and terminology. This article seeks to solve that issue by presenting the theoretical framework of both Schat’s earlier ‘classic’ tone-clock theory, and McLeod’s later expansion in one easily digestible article, and serve as an introduction for anyone who wishes to engage with TCT at a deeper level.Keywords: Jenny McLeod, Peter Schat, Tone-Clock, steering, intervallic prime form,
chromatic tonality, Tone Clock Pieces, Michael Norris, Erik Fernandez Ibarz, Allen Forte, pitch-class set.
