Deepening Understanding
Featured Beyond Pronunciation: Exploring the Intertwined World of Intonation Contour and Melody in Chinese-American Art Songs
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Xiaoming Tian
Chinese language’s intonation is often underestimated by singers and overlooked in analysis. However, in the realm of Chinese-American art songs, intonation serves as a powerful medium of cultural hospitality, inviting listeners into a rich tapestry of linguistic and musical traditions. This paper critically examines how intonation contours shape melodic composition in Chinese-American art songs, particularly through the work of Chen Yi. By integrating vocal pedagogy, linguistics, music theory, and Chinese opera history, this research delves into Chen Yi’s “Monologue” and reveals how traditional Chinese musical elements merge with language intonation, enriching her musical expression. This interdisciplinary approach not only highlights the cultural and linguistic nuances of these compositions but also frames them as acts of artistic hospitality, where diverse cultural elements are welcomed and celebrated. Through this lens, we explore the dynamics of cultural exchange and the power of music as a hospitable space for different traditions to converge. This research underscores the significance of intonation in Chinese vocal performances, fostering a deeper appreciation and understanding of Chinese-American art songs.
Scraping the Surface - Mechanical Devices and the Materiality of Postwar Abstraction: Dual Causality and Collective Guilt of Jasper Johns and Gerhard Richter
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anna Xie
This paper explores the role of mechanical devices in invoking self-referential and collective contingency within the context of global postwar abstraction, focusing on Jasper Johns’ circle paintings and Gerhard Richter’s squeegee works. In the pursuit of 'absolute integrity' in his circle paintings, Jasper Johns stages a dual causality bound to the device that scrapes the circle. The first layer of causality is acknowledged through the centering of the circle and the integration of the scraping apparatus into the painted surface. The second lies in the autonomy of the scraping device, which determines the painting’s frame and dimension. Scraping itself enacts an infinite flattening—an extension of Johns’ rejection of the figure-ground hierarchy. His engagement with the scraping process and devices reflect a transition from modernist to postmodernist preoccupations with materiality, positioning painting as a self-referential surface. The investigation with mechanicity extends to Gerhard Richter and his use of the squeegee in abstract painting, a process that is arduous, repetitive, and durational. For Richter and his fellow German postwar artists, they strive for a reconciliation of ethical transcendence and the collective guilt of horrors from the Nazi regime. Richter’s labor-intensive squeegee technique can be interpreted as a redemptive effort. Beneath the thick paint dragged by the squeegee often lie images related to the Holocaust, such as Birkenau (2014). Abstraction, as mediated through Richter’s squeegee technique, functions as a mnemonic representation of the Holocaust: it represses the horror beneath its layers while simultaneously marking the absence of what it hides.
Tablescapes: Veritas and Vanitas
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marcella Hackbardt
The history of photography abounds with images of tables set for real and imagined guests, communicating both shared and personal experiences of home, labor, and possessions. Early photography required long exposure times, and therefore the tabletop still life was an ideal subject to celebrate life through collections of fine domestic and imported goods. In some of the first photographs ever made, William Henry Fox Talbot photographed his collections of China and glassware on tables set for breakfast or tea, almost always from the vantage point of a guest approaching the table, welcomed into an inner circle and aristocratic lifestyle. Such seductive “life-style” photography practices continue today in social media tablescapes, with their melding of image with the mobilizing of desires expressing class, consumer culture, gastronomy, and hospitality. The still life may also draw upon the Nature Morte or Vanitas genre of painting that reached a peak in popularity in Europe in the 17th century, communicating the transience and vanity of life. Understood in these contexts, contemporary photographers continue to renew the language of the still life, presenting the tabletop and dinnerware as a site of complex emotions, gendered experience, vulnerability, memory, and loss. Their images elicit the opportunity to rethink issues such as waste, food, incarceration, and fragile beauty, while embracing/questioning personal proclivities and social practices, in a thoroughly photographic means of presentation and re-presentation.
