M Elizabeth Fleming

Ph.D. candidate in musicology, CUNY GC; Teaching Fellow, Lehman College

In addition to being an active freelancing musician in New York City, I am a Ph.D. candidate in musicology, where I research material and ethical relationships between the instrument—specifically the (French) horn—and the body, proposing a “new organology” of the hornist.

Social

Contact

mfleming@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Positions

Ph.D. Candidate, Music, CUNY Graduate Center

Graduate Teaching Fellow, Music, Lehman College

Academic Interests

chamber music, 20th and 21st century repertoires; performatic approaches to Western art music

embodiment, critical organology, new materialism, critical theory

Publications

conference presentations and performances

forthcoming.

Remembering the Body: Listening to Waldhorn and Ventilhorn in Brahms’s Trio, Op. 40. 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, San Antonio, TX. Nov 2018.

Signalling Past and Future: Messiaen’s “Appel Interstellaire.” Presentation and Performance at IHS 50: The 2018 International Horn Society Workshop, Muncie, IN. Aug 2018.

papers given

Going Digital: The New Valved Hornist in the Nineteenth Century. Paper presented at the Columbia Music Scholarship conference, “Music and/in Motion.” March 3, 2018 at Columbia Univeristy, NY.

In his orchestration treatise, Berlioz described the assemblage of players as “strings, tubes, chests, and surfaces made of wood or metal—machines bearing intelligence but subordinate to the action of an immense keyboard played upon by the conductor following the directions of the composer.” Berlioz’s treatise has been cited as a waypoint in processes of standardization and automation that drove music’s ultimate transcendence of materiality in the nineteenth century. Drawing upon studies in critical organology, embodiment, and reception, this paper more closely examines these processes upon the orchestral instruments themselves, specifically on the technology and technique of the horn and its players.

Heretofore simple tubes tethered to the harmonic series, trumpets and horns were transformed by the valve into machines capable of full chromatic motion to meet new imperatives of musical reproduction. Previously, the hornist shaped pitch via the manual labor of the right hand in the bell. With the valve, the horn gained new motion throughout its range by employing maneuvers of the left fingers to open windways within the instrument, and its characteristic variations in timbre could now be summoned as a compositional effect or technology of nostalgia. Considering the technicity of the valve through studies of the keyboard as an interface, I examine how Berlioz’s keyboard is realized as a determining mode of instrumentality salient in the design, embodied and musical technique, and reception of the new valved hornist, revealing how the techniques of orchestration are realized as technologies for domestication of instrumentalists and the disembodiment of timbre.

Somewhat Speak. Performance and discussion with collaborator Andrew Noseworthy presented at the 2017 English Students’ Association conference “The Vibrating World: Soundscapes and Undersongs,” CUNY Graduate Center, NY.

“Somewhat Speak” is a piece for solo French horn and tape created in collaboration between composer and hornist. The piece involves vocalizations, theatrical gestures, and a disruptive preparation of the instrument that impairs one side of the horn’s corpus by semi-removing—disarticulating—the valve slides on that side. Through repeated vocal gestures, the boundaries of fluency are troubled and later reimagined while constantly shifting expectations of what this concept—the modes of extension permitted the instrumentalist—may actually denote. The deconstruction of vocal gesture is later transferred to the horn, as it is played solely on the disabled side of the instrument for the majority of the piece. Giving way to what may be “standard” horn playing, the instrumentalist finally performs these gestures on the non-disabled side, but in the end always in reconciliation with the instrument’s already impairment.

The horn is typically an understated or misunderstood instrument within all kinds of ensembles, and fairly underrepresented in the solo repertoire—therefore an already limited voice as is. The disabling of the instrument in the piece is a way to reflect this phenomenon, and also a constitutive outside that further defines the instrumentalist’s voice, reflecting James Berger notion that “the dys-/disarticulate is the figure for the outside of language figured in language.” Through this “cripping”, the instrument’s vocality is recontextualized and “dysfluency” becomes productive difference. Human vocality is troubled in the tape part of the work: its content is created completely from the soloist’s schizophonic and heavily manipulated and reconstructed speaking and playing.

Musically Controlled: The Orthopedics of Equal Temperament. Paper presented at the 2017 CUNY Graduate Students in Music Conference, “Music and/as Discipline.”

In music, “temperament” is a systematic compromise of natural resonance, a tuning of
the scale that regulates pitch distribution across the fixed keyboard of the piano. In fact, the notion of temperament was first applied to bodily health, and even now retains its meaning as “a constitution or habit of mind, esp[ecially] as depending upon or connected with physical constitution.” In Middle English the adjective “temperate” could also refer to the quality of being “musically controlled.”

While equal temperament was being conceived, debated, and normalized in the 18th and 19th centuries, statisticians developed the bell curve, which constructed a normate standard against which human variation was measured, and medicine took up the eugenic model that determines which bodies are fit for reproduction to ensure the advancement of humanity. The lived body became improvable through physical exercise, deformities straightened through recently developed orthopedic methods that demanded conformation to artificially produced standards. Such practices are part and parcel of the tactics of discipline outlined by Foucault, that strategy of biopower that seeks to produce docile bodies as subject-objects. In today’s conservatory, pianistic prerogatives and imperatives, including equal temperament, are taken for granted in the formation of the musicking subject.

In this paper, I examined the normalization of pianistic equal temperament as the temperamental norm against which all music and musicking is measured and conceived, and which codes some musicking bodies as disabled and in need of correction or conformity. Drawing upon disabilities studies and the history of musical temperaments articulated to Foucault’s formation of the docile body, I will propose an orthopedics of pianistic equal temperament. Seated at the piano at the center of the 19th century bourgeois home or in the modern conservatory, we can observe how music is directly implicated in the construction and control of the social body.

“Des Canyons dans les canyons”: Sounding Territory. Paper and performance presented at the 2016 Locations and Dislocations: an Ecomusicological Conversation conference, Westminster Choir College, Rider University, NJ.

Messiaen’s concert-work Des Canyons aux étoiles… takes its inspiration from, and makesexplicit reference to, the unique landforms in Utah’s Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks. In October 2015, I took my horn to these parks to play the solo movement “Appel interstellaire,” hoping to hear as Messiaen might have when he visited these places over 40 years ago. Rather than solitary contemplation in geographic isolation, however, my resituated sounding of this “interstellar call” was heard by the many visitors to these parks, rendering each sonic gesture a public performance.

Typical concert halls provide bounded environments for an idealized containment ofsound and bodies attuned to listening. In this ethnographic essay presentation and performance, I consider the implications of my soundings in these rather impromptu concert halls. Drawing on powerful interactions with my auditor-interlocutors understood through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s “territorialization,” I consider that these performances proposed alternative assemblages of sound and bodies, a becoming-community emerging from the rendering sonorous of the canyon walls. Territorialization, Elizabeth Grosz explains, functions through “a proprietal relation to a piece of earth and a qualitative relation to properties unleashed” (2008:48). In processes of de- and reterritorialization, I was not playing Messiaen; rather, I was sounding the canyon and proposing a new sensate relationship to, and a new community upon, the earth.

The presentation was be followed with a performance of the “Appel interstellaire,”enhanced with the sympathetic resonance of the open-pedal piano as a way of recreating this experience of sited listening.