January 25, 2027
6 pm CET
Jennifer Ronyak: “Le double sexe” and Johanna Bordewijk-Roepman’s Les illuminations: The Promises and Limits of an Image
Starting in 1940 and continuing into 1941, Dutch woman composer Johanna Bordewijk-Roepman’s three movement vocal-orchestral work, Les illuminations, on poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, received multiple successful public performances in the Netherlands. Though based on three poems from the collection, the piece only sets one of the texts for voice: “Antique”–Rimbaud’s famed hermaphroditic prose-poem on the figure of the faun. Though the full poem is filled with dense, multiplicitous imagery, its central naming of “le double sexe” (the double sex) has guided a number of literary close readings of the poem.
That image and the interpretive tradition that belongs to it present challenges to song analysis in this particular case. These allow us to reflect upon the methods of art song studies, including in connection with gender themes in general and the practices of women composers of the past in particular. The image calls out for a search for the literary device’s repercussions in the song and its contexts. There is the possibility that the song’s music embodies that doubleness; the chance that a woman composer in a field dominated by men might have found something to identify with in it, and an opening for a larger contextual investigation into Dutch new classical music at that historical moment, which itself might be connected to the hermaphroditic idea through the small country’s scene’s unsteady position between building on French, German, and other outside trends. Yet these lines of inquiry also stack up heavily on Rimbaud’s three words. The phrase might not bear such weight. As much as it is possible to metaphorically connect poem, music, and context, it is worth contemplating also the limits of this operation and what they imply for today’s studies of art song. This is all the more so an issue in this particular case, in that there is not yet a robust international discourse on this reemerging Dutch woman composer of the past on which to build.
Jennifer Ronyak is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Institute for Music Aesthetics of the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. She is the author of Intimacy, Performance, and the Lied in the Early Nineteenth Century (Indiana 2018); the co-editor, with Benjamin Binder, of The Lied at the Crossroads of Performance and Musicology (Cambridge 2024); an Associate Editor at 19th-Century Music; and Co-Editor of the series Studien zur Wertungsforschung.
Virginia Jansen: Analyzing advocacy in the performance history of Florence Beatrice Price’s “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord”
At her historic 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert, Marian Anderson performed Florence Price’s arrangement of the Negro Spiritual “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord,” but it was cut off from the radio broadcast of the event. Though this anecdote is a fitting metaphor for the discrimination against Price by the classical music industry, the performance history of “My Soul’s Been Anchored” defies the oft-told tale of Price’s “rediscovery” in the 2000s. Black women concert singers who worked in coalition with Price continued to perform the arrangement following her death and a new generation took it up during the increased interest in Price’s work in the 1980s and 1990s. In this paper, I analyze five performances of “My Soul’s Been Anchored”: by Anderson (1945), Ellabelle Davis (1950), Leontyne Price (1965), Pamela Dillard (1994), and Roberta Alexander (1999). In conversation with scholarship on Harry Burleigh’s Spiritual arrangements (Wilson 1996) and Price’s network in interwar Chicago (Ege 2024), I position Price’s arrangement within the Black concert singing tradition of the early to mid-twentieth century. Through transcribing these performances, I explore the interweaving roles of composer, arranger, and performer within a genre situated on a shifting continuum of orality and notation. I ask: how is orality reinscribed when a piece becomes known through those who perform it? And how does adherence to the score function within advocacy for Price’s legacy? By placing these performances in relationship to each other, I gesture towards a heterophonic history of Price’s arrangement, in and through revival.
Virginia Jansen is a scholar and musician currently pursuing a PhD in Musicology at the University of California, Davis. She is broadly interested in women’s musical histories of the 19th and 20th century United States, with a focus on the material history of music making. Virginia has presented her work at annual meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Society for American Music, where she also serves as Student Forum Co-Chair. Her upcoming essay in Open Access Musicology, “Reviving the ‘Golden Age’ in Schmigadoon! (2021),” posits the musical comedy series as a framework for understanding contemporary revivals of mid-century Broadway musicals. As both a teacher and Student Affairs professional, Virginia is passionate about fostering supportive and inclusive communities for students. In her spare time, Virginia can be found watching a cooking competition show or playing board games with friends and family.