Abstracts for February 6, 2004

Todd Decker: Delivering Miss Otis's Regrets: Performers and Arrangers Tackle Cole Porter's Tale of an Unlikely Lynching

Cole Porter composed "Miss Otis Regrets (She's Unable to Lunch Today)" (1934) when national awareness of lynching was at its zenith. The lyric, in which the singer narrates the lynching of a white woman, is structured around disturbing reversals of race, class, and gender. The seventy-year performance history of the song, as captured on over forty recordings, offers examples of how popular music has sung America's unspeakable history. Performers and arrangers have used startlingly different musical means to re-tell Porter's unlikely lynching, demonstrating how performance can ignore, neutralize, or trivialize the meaning of a racially charged text.

Nathan Platte: Dream Analysis: Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Weaving of Music, Speech, and Visuals
in Warner Brothers' A Midsummer Night's Dream

Erich Wolfgang Korngold first arrived in Hollywood to adapt music for the film, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935). Using Felix Mendelssohn’s incidental music as a foundation, Korngold constructed a score containing his most intricate intertwining of musical and visual elements. His alterations to Mendelssohn’s music are noteworthy and reveal a deep sensitivity to narrative tone. In addition, his association with studio personnel expanded the role of music within the film’s production and placed some cinematic effects at the service of the score. As analysis will show, Korngold’s score enriches one’s perspective on the composer’s later Hollywood career.