Institute for Studies In American Music Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York NEWSLETTER
Volume XXXIV	No. 1 Fall 2004
Inside This Issue: The Composer, the Work, and Its Audience by Adrienne Fried Block Calypso as a World Music by Kenneth Bilby What Is a River by Noah Creshevsky Jewish American Music: Review by Evan Rapport More News from Nowhere: Review by David G. Pier Reviving the Folk: Review by Ray Allen ISAM Matters Home	ISAM Matters By Ellie Hisama This academic year marks four conferences cosponsored by the Institute. Calypso in New York and the Atlantic World, which took place on 30 October at Brooklyn College, featured presenters from Trinidad, the U.K., and the far reaches of the U.S. including Alaska. Kenneth Bilby's article "Calypso as a World Music" in this issue of the Newsletter is a revised version of his conference paper. We are delighted to be publishing as our lead article Adrienne Fried Block's "The Composer, The Work, and its Audience, 1820-1920." Dr. Block's article is drawn from her introductory remarks at A Century of Composing in America, 1820-1920, a conference held at the CUNY Graduate Center on 17-19 November. The CUNY Graduate Center's next Graduate Students in Music (GSIM) conference, to be held on 19 March 2005, will focus on American music studies, and will feature a keynote address by former ISAM director and Graduate Center alumna Carol J. Oja (William Powell Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University). For more information about the GSIM conference, please visit <web.gc.cuny.edu/music/events/GSIM2005.html>. Finally, the biennial conference Feminist Theory and Music, cosponsored by Brooklyn College, the CUNY Graduate Center, and New York University, will be held on 23-26 June 2005. We welcome proposals for papers and panels (please see p. 7). In 2005, Brooklyn College turns 75, and to celebrate our birthday, on 21-24 March, the Cerf Music Festival will spotlight over thirty years of work from the Conservatory's Center for Computer Music. Scheduled guests will include Charles Dodge, Phill Niblock, Curtis Bahn, Frances White, Richard Karpen, Joan La Barbara, TV Pow, and Ensemble Reflex. For further information, please visit <www.bcmusic.org/cerffest>. Our annual colloquium series, Music in Polycultural America, featured four guest speakers in Fall 2004: Graduate Center alumna and former Brooklyn College faculty member Judith Tick (Matthews Distinguished University Professor of Music at Northeastern University), who gave a paper on modern feminist scholarship and American music; the 2004 Trinidad Calypso Monarch Hollis "Chalkdust" Liverpool, who performed in a concert with Brooklyn College alumnus Frankie McIntosh and spoke about the diaspora of calypso; and Farah Jasmine Griffin (Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University) and our own Salim Washington, who presented research drawn from their forthcoming book on the collaboration between John Coltrane and Miles Davis. Our guests in Spring 2005 will be George Lewis, Sherrie Tucker, Daniel Goldmark, and Jason Stanyek. For further information, please visit our website <www.bcisam.org.> We are grateful to the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities and the Cerf Fund for continuing to support our series. Congratulations to Judith Tick, who was inducted this fall into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and to Tania León, whose music was celebrated at Columbia University in Miller Theater's Composers Portraits concert series in November. I am also pleased to announce my appointment as the new editor of American Music beginning in Fall 2005, and invite submissions to the journal. Finally, we note with sadness the death of Edward T. Cone on 23 October 2004. Dr. Cone's work as a writer, composer, pianist, teacher, and philanthropist will long be remembered. His books Musical Form and Musical Performance and The Composer's Voice influenced countless scholars, and the volumes he edited with Benjamin Boretz, including Perspectives on American Composers and Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory, will continue to be read by new generations of students. Dr. Cone was a generous supporter of contemporary composition in America, and through his foundation, provided major support for our festivals celebrating Henry Cowell (1997) and Ruth Crawford Seeger (2001). Donations in his memory may be made to Friends of Music, Woolworth Center, Department of Music, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544. Ellie M. Hisama