CHIGIANA CONFERENCE 2024
CHIGIANA CONFERENCE 2024
PERFORMING CLASSICS TODAY:
The Role of the Performer in the Actualization of Music
Salone dei Concerti – Palazzo Chigi Saracini
Accademia Musicale Chigiana, Siena
December 4-6, 2024
DAY TWO
DAY ONE
A further aim is to incentivise debate between interpreters and musicologists, with the input of musicians who have undertaken artistically significant initiatives, while bringing into dialogue the repertoires of the nineteenth-century with other musical experiences of the current day and the demands and sensibilities of modern audiences.
The conference sessions will be available for live streaming on this page. All times indicated are in Italian Time (UTC+1)
SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
Antonio Cascelli, Valerie Goertzen, Stefano Jacoviello, Roe-Min Kok, John Mortensen, Susanna Pasticci, John Rink, Giorgio Sanguinetti.
ORGANIZATION COMMITTEE
Angelo Armiento, Antonio Artese, Luigi Casolino, Marica Coppola, Matteo Macinanti, Anna Passarini, Marta Sabatini, Giovanni Vai
DAY I
WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 4
15:00 – 15:15
SALUTO DI APERTURA / WELCOME
Carlo Rossi Presidente Accademia Musicale Chigiana
Nicola Sani Direttore artistico dell’Accademia Musicale Chigiana
15:15 – 15:30
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
Susanna Pasticci (Chigiana Journal Editor-in-Chief, Sapienza Università di Roma
15:30
TALK
Performing Classics Today
Special guest: Uri Caine (pianist and composer) in Conversation with Stefano Jacoviello
(Università di Siena/Accademia Musicale Chigiana)
17:00
KEYNOTE I
John Rink (University of Cambridge)
Reimagining Chopin: in Pursuit of Alternatives
18:00 – SESSION I
The Romantic Virtuoso
CHAIR: Antonio Cascelli (Maynooth University)
Gilad Rabinovitch (Queens College)
Echoes of Improvisation in Franz Liszt’s B-Minor Sonata
Bobby Mitchell (Conservatorium van Amsterdam)
Playing Schumann Again for the First Time
DAY II
THURSDAY DECEMBER 5 2024
10.00 – Roundtable 1
Designing Programs for Twenty-first Century Audiences
CHAIR: Nicola Sani (Accademia Musicale Chigiana)
Peter de Caluwe (Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie)
Anna Leonardi (Head of Publishing SZ Sugar)
Franco Masotti (Ravenna Festival)
12.00 – Session 2
The Language of Improvisation
CHAIR: Christoph Flamm (Universität Heidelberg)
Claire O’Donnell (Maynooth University)
Vocabulary and Syntax in the Preludes of Tommaso Giordani: Perspectives for Pedagogy and Performance
Gigliola Di Grazia (Hochschule der Künste, Bern)
Le (presunte) improvvisazioni simulate di Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1785-1849)
15.00 – Keynote 2
Valerie Goertzen (Loyola University, New Orleans)
Written and Unwritten: Arrangements in Brahms’s Performances
16.30 – Session 3
The Interactive Muse Project
Susanna Pasticci (Sapienza Università di Roma)
How We Got into the Reproducibility Canon and Why we Need to Get Out
Andrea Ravignani (Sapienza Università di Roma, Aarhus University)
The Psychology of Musical Performance and Improvisation
Costantino Mastroprimiano (Conservatorio di Perugia)
L’arte del preludiare
Giorgio Sanguinetti (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”)
The Craft of Partiment
18.15 – The Interactive Muse Concert
Giorgio Sanguinetti piano / Costantino Mastroprimiano piano / Lucio Perotti piano
DAY III
FRIDAY DECEMBER 6, 2024
9.30 – Session 4
Beyond the Keyboard
CHAIR: Massimiliano Locanto (Università di Salerno)
Edward Klorman (McGill University)
Bach’s Cello Suites before Pablo Casals: Three Case Studies
Claudia Patanè (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata”)
Direzione d’orchestra ed estemporaneità: un tempo per improvvisare
Robert de Bree (Royal Conservatoire The Hague)
Improvised Mono-Thematic Fantasias for Wind Players – Pedagogical Puzzle Pieces in Methods and Repertoire
11.30 – Session 5
Interactions
CHAIR: Francesco Bigoni (Siena Jazz University)
Ludovico Peroni (Siena Jazz University)
Interpretazione, estemporizzazione e improvvisazione: per una tassonomia della performance storicamente informata.
Lina Zikra (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris)
Reuse of the 19th-century Classical Piano Repertoire in Pieces Created by duo Jah Poney
Jonathon Crompton (Columbia University)
Hearing Hybridity: Jason Moran’s Version of Brahms’s Intermezzo op.118, no.2
15.00 – Session 6
Voices
CHAIR: Giorgio Sanguinetti (Università di Roma “Tor Vergata)
Claire Burrell-McDonald, Anna Fraser, Neal Peres Da Costa
Queensland Conservatorium of Music, Sydney Conservatorium of Music)
Reimagining the sound world of 18th-century singers using practice-led and extrapolative methods
Francesco Izzo (University of Southampton)
Il canto verdiano oggi (e domani): Note dall’aula e dalla sala prove
Natasha Loges (Hochschule für Musik, Freiburg)
Schubert’s Winterreise and the Aestheticisation of Global Art Song
17.00 – Roundtable 2
Interpreting, Communicating and Bring Classics back to the Audience
CHAIR: Stefano Jacoviello (Accademia Chigiana di Siena, Università di Siena)
Leonardo Damen (Conservatorio Santa Cecilia, Roma)
Susanna Franchi (Il giornale della musica)
Anna Scalfaro (Università di Bologna)
Biagio Scuderi (Società del Quartetto di Milano, Università di Milano)
Alessandro Stella (pianist and producer)
SESSION ARCHIVE
CHRISTOPHER SMITH
Vernacular Music Center, Texas Tech University
Against the Grain and Out Yonder: Decolonizing the Music Conservatory via Vernacular Pedagogies
In a 21st century post-industrial west in which disinformation and the “fog of propaganda” are intentionally deployed via powerful and addictive digital media, oppositional art-making which situates itself in local, tactile, communal, and somatic material experience is an act of resistance. In university music education systems, in which outcomes and assessments drive influence, promotion, and finance, to attempt to recover—or even to employ – the art of the grassroots local is both systemically challenging and immensely important. Drawing on analytical frames from performance studies, the anthropology of performance, and practice-based research in team- and project-oriented learning, this presentation investigates, problematizes, and rationalizes the production of a piece of site-specific immersive musical theater, set in – and in fact suggested by – a decayed 1928 movie palace in Levelland Texas in the American Southwest, undertaken by a multimodal team of university composers, dramatists, educators, and student performers, in partnership with a community-based non-profit. It further investigates strategies for recovering the tactile, communal, and experiential in the era of pandemic quarantine, and the means by which these essential human experiences can be recovered via alternate media. It argues that vernacular pedagogies – learning which is, in its ethos, intentions, and models, project-, and apprenticeship-based – provide a way forward from the trap of centralized, standardized, hierarchical, incremental, canon-based, and sequential university music education, and models for an artistic citizenship which is ethical, responsive, and engaged.
Christopher J. Smith is Professor, Chair of Musicology, and founding director of the Vernacular Music Center at Texas Tech University. He composed the theatrical show Dancing at the Crossroads (2013), the “folk oratorio” Plunder! Battling for Democracy in the New World (2017), and the immersive-theater show Yonder (2019). His monograph The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy (University of Illinois Press, 2013) won the Irving Lowens Award; his newest book is Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History (University of Illinois Press, 2019). He is a collaborator, with Thomas Irvine (Southampton), on the Turing Institute project “Jazz as Social System.” A former student of jazz pedagogue David N. Baker, he conducts the Elegant Savages Orchestra symphonic folk group at Texas Tech, and concertizes on guitar, bouzouki, banjo, and diatonique accordion. He is a former nightclub bouncer, carpenter, lobster fisherman, and oil-rig roughneck, and a published poet.