Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

D.M.A.

Program

Music

Advisor

V. Kofi Agawu

Committee Members

Scott Burnham

John Musto

Charles Neidich

Subject Categories

Musicology | Music Performance | Music Theory

Keywords

chamber music, American music, rediscovery, musical analysis, Charles Martin Loeffler, Boston

Abstract

Modern musicians play a lot of old music and a lot of new music, but not so much “new old music.” This study—with its accompanying critical edition score, world-premiere recording and first present-day performances—represents, at long last, the deliverance of one such work from the ashes of history to the ears of the present: Charles Martin Loeffler’s forgotten Octet for Two Clarinets, Harp, Two Violins, Viola, Cello and Double Bass, a piece that was left unpublished, unrecorded and unheard since 1897.

This paper documents my efforts to finally reintroduce the Octet to the repertoire. By cross-referencing the autograph manuscript score with the parts from the premiere performance—both heavily revised by the composer—I have reconstructed the score to create the first critical edition of Loeffler’s Octet. Throughout this study I have attempted to situate the Octet in its historical and musical contexts through primary sources and my own musical analysis, suggesting along the way some reasons for its disappearance alongside reasons for Loeffler’s relative obscurity today. This context informs my approach to resolving ambiguity and reconciling philosophical problems of reconstructing the score. It also brings up larger issues of the limits of the musical canon and the way nationalism has privileged a certain construct of American musical identity; the extent to which Loeffler and his music embody the search for an American sound and yet exist fundamentally at odds with nationalist retellings of music history is just one in a web of contradictions that surround the composer. And by resuscitating the piece for its first performances in living memory and first ever recording, I have attempted to realize, 127 years late, Loeffler’s contribution to the chamber music repertoire and to American musical history.

Responding to Loeffler’s relative obscurity today, Chapter 1: Revisionist Music History situates the composer and his Octet in their historical and musical contexts, filling in gaps in our knowledge by retelling familiar histories with attention to Loeffler’s role in them. By chronicling Loeffler’s prominence in Boston society and the American musical landscape and contextualizing the Octet’s place in musical history, this chapter elucidates the significance of the work’s discovery and spotlights Loeffler’s role in shaping American music at its dawn. The chapter also examines Loeffler’s relationship with critical reception: his friction with Boston’s conservative press and his private sensitivity to criticism, which, with his obsessive impulse to revise, led him to withhold most of his music from publication.

This context becomes the Rosetta Stone for translating Loeffler’s forgotten Octet back into sound, which is the project of Chapter 2: From the Ashes. This chapter details the state of Loeffler’s manuscripts that served as the source materials for my reconstruction. It also qualifies those artifacts with certain considerations of Loeffler’s psychology and patterns shared between the Octet and his other contemporaneous works, notably resisting the urge to uncritically accept revisions to the score as a more evolved version of the Octet.

While using the historical context of the first chapter to guide my efforts to decode the manuscripts, Chapter 2 also engages with musical analysis, particularly related to issues of harmony and form, as a tool for resolving ambiguity between the source materials. In doing so, it segues naturally into Chapter 3: “New Old Music,” which endeavors for the first time to map the course and character of Loeffler’s Octet, revealing a number of intertextual resonances with more familiar repertoire while also underlining the work’s uniquely Loefflerian elements.

Chapter 4: Reception Through the Ages compares criticism of the Octet’s 1897 premiere with reactions to the first present-day performances. Loeffler’s Octet offers a unique case study in reception over time, as a piece that is as new to listeners today as it was when it was first heard in 1897. Whereas music by Loeffler’s contemporaries has become canonized through repetition over more than a century, the Octet has not enjoyed that same ubiquity. And yet, without any change in familiarity or musical content over the last 127 years, critical opinion of the work has nevertheless improved dramatically in the present day. While contemporary and present-day reviewers approach the Octet with different vocabularies, nationality is a common theme of the work’s criticism in both centuries. The collision of national styles identified in the Octet by reviewers past and present reflects Loeffler’s cosmopolitan identity, and also offers a fresh hearing of the “American sound” as a foil to the more familiar musical Americana of Copland and Gershwin. When the piece was last heard in 1897, Loeffler’s influence was helping shape early American musical life and guiding the young country toward an authentic voice. Today, resuscitating Loeffler’s Octet not only gives voice to the forgotten sounds of its score, but suggests an alternative model of American musical identity by embodying the cultural complexities of his adopted country.

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