On February 23rd, Music and Linguistics Major Lili Tobias \u201819 presented her paper titled, “‘All my heart, in this my singing:’ Amy Beach and the Women’s Clubs of New England,” at the American Musicology Society – New England (AMS-NE) Chapter\u2019s winter meeting. The AMS-NE Chapter\u2019s winter meeting invited proposals for roundtable sessions or workshops (pedagogical, performative, and\/or scholarly). Successful proposals would position the author\u2019s contribution with respect to previous scholarship, and suggests the paper\u2019s significance for the musicological community.<\/p>\n
The paper that Tobias presented at AMS-NE began as her senior comprehensive paper that she wrote for her music major. Under the guidance of Professors Barbara Milewski and Jon Kochavi, Tobias chose late 18th to early 19th century American composer, Amy Beach, as her research topic. \u201cMy main argument is that her music is best discussed and analyzed within the context of other music written and performed by women,\u201d Tobias said. \u201cThis is because Beach wrote most of her music to be performed by musicians in women’s music clubs throughout New England, which is clear from her choice of instrumentation (piano and voice, mainly).\u201d<\/p>\n
Tobias further noted that Beach\u2019s choice of instrumentation matches the skills of the women musicians in those music clubs. \u201cFrom a theoretical perspective, too, Beach’s harmonic language matches that of other music written by women during this era,\u201d Tobias said.<\/p>\n
It was not a difficult choice for Tobias to research Beach\u2019s music for her senior comprehensive paper, since Tobias enthusiastically exclaims that Beach is her favorite composer. Not only that, Tobias saw a point of intervention to previous scholarly research on Beach\u2019s music. \u201cI wanted to address the problems with many accounts of Beach’s music, since they often focus on her large-scale compositions,\u201d Tobias said. \u201cBy writing about her songs, I hoped to emphasize that these small-scale works were integral to her career as a composer, specifically because they brought about social music-making within women’s music clubs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tobias was grateful to have had the opportunity to share her research with the public and to be a part of this year\u2019s AMS-NE conference. Tobias highlighted the fact that this year\u2019s conference had so many presentations on music composed by women. Because of this, many presentations overlapped with topics that Tobias discussed in her paper, creating highly engaging conversations.<\/p>\n
Tobias also had the opportunity to attend and support another Swarthmore student paper presentation at a different musicology conference. Recent graduate Rachel Hottle \u201818 presented her paper titled, \u201cInfluences of Bluegrass and Radiohead on Metric Complexity in the Punch Brothers,\u201d at the 2019 Rutgers University Musicology Society (RUMS) conference. The Punch Brothers is a progressive bluegrass ensemble. In the paper, Hottle \u201cproposes a comparative genre analysis of metric complexity in Punch Brothers, which highlights the influence of metric conventions common in bluegrass and the progressive rock style of Radiohead.\u201d<\/p>\n
Currently, Tobias does not have any specific plans to expand her own paper, however, she does want to do more research on the topic. Particularly, Tobias said \u201cI would love to expand on the theoretical section, since I’m more of a theory person than a musicology person. I only got to collect data from three of Beach’s songs, so it would be great to do an entire corpus study of all her songs in order to provide better support for the main argument of the paper.\u201d<\/p>\n
David Chan ’19<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On February 23rd, Music and Linguistics Major Lili Tobias \u201819 presented her paper titled, “‘All my heart, in this my singing:’ Amy Beach and the Women’s Clubs of New England,” at the American Musicology Society – New England (AMS-NE) Chapter\u2019s winter meeting. The AMS-NE Chapter\u2019s winter meeting invited proposals for roundtable sessions or workshops (pedagogical, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":7518,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7586"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7586"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7586\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7588,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7586\/revisions\/7588"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/academics\/music-and-dance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}