October 26, 2026
6 pm CET
Stephen Rodgers: From Archive to Album: Curation as Care
What does it mean to care for music that has been forgotten? Scholarly recovery is often described as discovery: a neglected composer rediscovered, an unpublished work brought to light. But bringing music to light is only the beginning. For neglected repertoire to find an audience, it must also be edited, performed, recorded, programmed, and placed into new relationships with other works.
This presentation uses the idea of curatorial care to consider the possibilities and responsibilities involved in such acts of mediation. My point of departure is Imagined Song Cycles, a forthcoming album of nineteenth-century songs by Elise Schmezer, Pauline Decker, Mary Wurm, and Julie Schnitzler. I assembled four cycles from stand-alone songs scattered across rare editions and manuscripts, not to reconstruct lost works or recover authorial intentions, but to imagine works that history did not give us and that, under different social and professional conditions, might have existed.
Drawing on recent work on care and curation, I argue that curation is not simply selection or preservation. It is a form of interpretation that creates relationships, directs attention, and changes what is presented. I consider the four cycles as occupying different points on a spectrum of intervention, from selection and sequencing to textual alteration, transposition, and the relocation of musical material.
I focus especially on Julie Schnitzler’s Nachtgesänge. I examine two interventions: a textual alteration that makes a specific loss more ambiguous, and a musical decision to move material from the final piano postlude to the cycle’s opening, creating a circular tonal and dramatic design. Both reveal the trade-offs involved in curatorial work: new frames can make relationships audible and give performers and listeners larger structures to inhabit, but they can also suppress meanings or impose narratives absent from the original materials.
Stephen Rodgers is Edmund A. Cykler Chair in Music, Professor of Music Theory and Musicianship, and Department Head of Academic Music at the University of Oregon, where he has been teaching since 2005. He specializes in the study of song, especially songs by underrepresented composers. His book, The Songs of Clara Schumann, was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press, and his edited collection, The Songs of Fanny Hensel, appeared with Oxford University Press in 2021. He also hosts a podcast about poetry and song, called Resounding Verse, as well as a website devoted to songs by composers whose music has been marginalized, called Art Song Augmented. He is currently Vice President of the Society for Music Theory.
Karin Martensen: Caring for voices, stories and compositions: Telling stories through songs
In my presentation, I would like to explain how the His Master’s Voice archive in New York can be used to tell the history of song and to illustrate a “caring for voices, stories, and compositions.” The record company HMV kept written records of all the recordings it produced between 1903 and 1958. These are not simply recording logs listing the artist’s name, the work, and the date. Instead, they also include details about the technical conditions of each recording session. These records therefore provide concrete evidence of the recording engineers’ work. They also make it possible to show which artists recorded which works—and which they did not. If one examines the many hun dreds of entries in the documents mentioned, it becomes clear that all the great singers have recorded opera arias and folk songs. But there are exactly 16 entries for the Kunstlied! At first glance, therefore, the story that can be told here is a gap: the Kunstlied does not exist in sound recordings! The reason for this is undoubtedly the fame of these singers as opera singers: they also performed in concert recitals in that capacity, and, as one newspaper put it, the artists were more interesting than the works. And even though it can be shown that art songs were performed in concert programs, only a handful of artists were active internationally as art song singers. It is therefore particularly significant to note which works were nevertheless recorded. Marcella Sembrich, for example, recorded Richard Strauss’s “Ständchen” in 1906, a art song with clearly erotic content. Yet she re leased only four songs on record in total. Does the “voice without a body” play a role here—a dis course on sound recording that may be of particular interest to the art song (and stands in contrast to “performing the self”)? And is this especially true with regard to the theme of “music and sexual ity”? My thesis is that the history of the art song can also be told from the perspective of sound recording. Accordingly, my presentation will focus on the concept of “Caring for compositions”: What perfor mance traditions and histories of reception related to the (erotic) art song can be identified in light of sound recordings?
Karin Martensen had studied musicology at the University of Hamburg. In the spring of 2012, she received her doctorate at the HMTM Hannover with a dissertation on Anna Bahr-Mildenburg’s stage directions for Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. From 2016 to 2019, she was PI of the DFG funded project “Technologies of Singing” in Detmold (together with Rebecca Grotjahn and Malte Kob). – 2019 to 2022: PI of the DFG project “The Recording Studio as a Discursive Space” at TU Berlin/Audio Communication. – 2022 to 2025: PI of the DFG project “Cultural Data Analysis of Production Cultures in Classical Music” (together with Stefan Weinzierl) at TU Berlin. ‒ Karin Martensen has taught in Hannover, Detmold, and Berlin and has published several works on Anna Bahr-Mildenburg, sound recordings, and the construction of the body and voice. She has also given lectures on these topics in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada, and the United States
Betty Allison / Amanda Lalonde: Care and the Compositional Voice of Julie Baroni-Cavalcabò
This presentation connects our project to recover the Lieder of Julie Baroni-Cavalcabò (1813-1887) with nineteenth-century efforts to champion her compositions, examining both through the framework of care. Drawing on Nel Noddings’ (1984) feminist philosophy of care and Karin Hendricks’ (2025) music-specific extension of this framework, the concepts of caring-about, caring-for, and caring-with are central to our work.
We begin by providing an overview of Baroni-Cavalcabò and her work as a Lied composer. Baroni-Cavalcabò published at least twenty Lieder from the late 1820s through the 1840s. Her songs were released by prominent publishers and performed in prestigious venues. Critics praised her songs for being imaginative, deeply feeling, and well crafted. Despite her nineteenth-century reputation, there is very little research that even mentions Baroni-Cavalcabò. Therefore, acknowledging the need for this work is an essential element in caring-about forgotten women composers.
Our presentation then turns to caring-for Baroni-Cavalcabò’s compositional voice, examining past and present actions taken in response to her needs as a composer. We first consider the figures who sustained and transmitted her work in the nineteenth century, highlighting the ways in which family and salon environments, Franz Xaver Mozart’s fostering of her youthful talents; Robert and Clara Schumann’s support for her professionalisation; and Karel Strakatý’s, Joseph Staudigl’s, and Philippine Edelsberg’s performances of her songs cared-for her compositional voice. While many of these figures engaged in personal relationships with Baroni-Cavalcabò, caring-for both her as an artist and her compositions, we view our present work through Noddings’ concept of “aesthetical caring,” where caring-for is focused on an idea or object rather than a person. We demonstrate how our project envisions caring-for her songs through a combination of musicological and performance-based research, illustrating this through our approach to her song “Warum?” Finally, we conclude with a brief consideration of caring-with and the significance of relational shared work and learning, from the collaborative approach to our research process, to how our work will allow future performers and audiences to build their own relationships with the songs of Baroni-Cavalcabò.
Teaching artist and soprano Betty Allison is an assistant professor of voice at Dalhousie University and co-director of the DalOpera program. A graduate of the Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio, she has performed more than forty operatic roles and brings nearly twenty years of experience as a recitalist and chamber musician. Her scholarly research bridges performance and pedagogy with a focus on singers, musicians’ wellness, and artistic sustainability. She is particularly interested in how collaborative processes and supportive pedagogy help maintain healthy and resilient singing careers. In collaboration with Amanda Lalonde, she is also preparing a critical edition of songs by nineteenth‑century composer Julie Baroni-Cavalcabò, helping to return these rarely heard songs to the concert stage.
Amanda Lalonde is an associate professor of musicology at the University of Saskatchewan and holds a PhD in musicology from Cornell University. Her current projects examine the Lieder of Julie Baroni-Cavalcabò (in collaboration with Betty Allison) and women’s artistic relationships with piano improvisation and improvisatory genres in the first half of the nineteenth century. Her work has been published in journals including Music and Letters, 19th-Century Music, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and in the collections The Songs of Fanny Hensel, Clara Schuman Studies, Clara and Robert Schumann in Context, and Women Pianists in Global Contexts.