Lecturer

Tad Biggs, Ph.D. in Musicology at Washington University in St. Louis

Title

A Fugitive Quixote: Julia Perry's Quinary Quixotic Songs (1976)

Abstract

Completed in 1976 but unperformed and unpublished until 2024, Quinary Quixotic Songs stands out among Julia Perry’s final works and remains one of her least examined. Scored for bass-baritone and an unusual chamber ensemble of flute, clarinet, viola, baritone horn, and piano, the five-movement song cycle sets Perry’s own surreal, cryptic texts. Although the title invokes Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the music stages a darker meditation on striving against injustice and human limitation, locating a “quixotic” impulse in sites as varied as an imprisoned poet and the spectacle of a bullfight.

This paper argues that Quinary Quixotic Songs offers unique insight into ongoing historiographic efforts to categorize Perry within neoclassicist, modernist, and postmodernist frameworks. This study engages Tammy Kernodle’s account of the “Black postmodern concert aesthetic” alongside Ryan Dohoney’s notion of “metamodernist drift,” both of which advance historiographic and ideological accounts of Julia Perry’s musical aesthetic. By focusing on one of Perry’s later, most experimental works, this paper extends and recalibrates their insights. Through close analysis, I demonstrate that although Perry deploys postmodern compositional techniques, like fragmentation, irony, and intertextuality, the work does not rupture into a play of surfaces or postmodern detachment. Each song articulates its own musico-structural logic and moves through dramatically different subjects, generating a dizzying heterogeneity. Fragmentation becomes the condition through which structural depth emerges. Beneath this fractured surface persists a fundamentally modernist utopian gesture: an ethical demand for striving.

Quinary Quixotic Songs offers a striking example of how Perry operated within a space of fugitive abstraction, where the work’s opacity unsettles hermeneutic containment yet betrays a distinctly modernist meditation on striving as a necessary, if unrealizable, utopian demand. Given Perry’s eclectic style, this work provides one instance of how Perry’s music resists totalizing narratives of race, gender, and conventional stylistic periodization in twentieth-century American concert music. This analysis thus contributes to the necessary recontextualization of Perry within ongoing historiographic debates demanded by her diverse output and suggests a model for the interpretation of Perry and other Black women composers of her generation.

Biography

Tad is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is also a Lynne Cooper Harvey Fellowship in American Culture Studies. 

Tad’s research focuses on classical and popular music in the United States, with particular attention to African American composers and the ways race, gender, and class shape the reception, circulation, and study of music. A central dimension of his work is the recovery of the life and music of composer Julia Perry (1924–1979). As part of this project, Tad organized and secured funding for the 2024 Julia Perry Centenary Symposium and Concert, a multi-day event in St. Louis that featured talks by an international group of guest scholars, a roundtable, and a concert devoted entirely to Perry’s music. 

His dissertation, Listening for Julia Perry’s Voice, traces a selection of her vocal works across the postwar era, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Cold War, situating her output within Black Modernist and feminist frameworks. The project blends musical analysis and archival research and extends critical theoretical approaches within the study of Black modernist concert music. 

Lecturer 

Kimia Fakharinia, Ph.D. in Musicology at Washington University in St. Louis

Title

“Too virile”: Progressive Compositional Ambition and Unconstrained Virtuosity in Cécile Chaminade’s Concertstück

Abstract

Cécile Chaminade was a French composer and pianist best known for her character pieces and mélodies. Yet her early oeuvre also included orchestral and symphonic works, such as the Concertstück for piano and orchestra. By the 1890s, however, her output shifted significantly toward shorter, commercially viable piano pieces and songs. Previous scholarship, notably Marcia J. Citron’s monograph, has explained Chaminade’s limited engagement with large-scale genres in financial, aesthetic, or discriminatory terms. While these factors form an important backdrop to her career, they leave room for closer analytical attention to individual large-scale works. I therefore center the Concertstück, a concerted orchestral work through which Chaminade staged her early artistic ambitions, yet one that has received little sustained scholarly analysis. Rather than focusing solely on reception or scale, I examine how Chaminade articulated her ambitions within the composition itself, engaging contemporary aesthetics and culturally coded virtuosity in tension with gendered expectations in nineteenth-century musical discourse.

I argue that the Concertstück synthesizes two modes of compositional and pianistic performance: a compositional ambition articulated through Lisztian piano virtuosity, rich orchestration, and ambiguous formal design aligned with the “progressive” aesthetics of the New Germans, and a highly popular, exoticist, and culturally coded mode of virtuosity in its invocation of the style hongrois. In doing so, Chaminade positions herself both as a composer of large-scale works and as a pianist capable of delivering the expressive intensity associated with the style hongrois. Drawing on Jonathan Bellman’s discussion of the style hongrois and his exploration of nineteenth-century stereotypes of Roma, I show that this idiom carried connotations sharply opposed to the ideals of cultivation, restraint, and refinement that governed women’s musical expression at the time. The reception of the Concertstück was gendered, with a critic describing it as “strong and virile—perhaps too virile,” lamenting the absence of the grace typically associated with her piano works and songs. The charge of virility thus emerges as a response to Chaminade’s aesthetic transgression of prevailing norms of feminine musicianship. This tension had lasting consequences, contributing to her subsequent move away from large-scale works in her compositional output and concert programming.

Biography

Kimia is a third-year PhD student in musicology. Her research centers on nineteenth-century women composers and pianists such as Cécile Chaminade and Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler. Prior to graduate studies at Washington University in St. Louis, Kimia earned her master’s in piano performance at the University of Tehran.

Lecturer 

Seoyoon Choi, Ph.D. in Music Theory at Washington University in St. Louis

Title

"A New Phase of South Korean Democratic Participation: K-pop Fandom, Young Women, and the Transformation of Protest Culture"

Abstract

In December 2024, South Korean citizens organized large-scale yet peaceful rallies demanding then-President Yoon’s resignation after his declaration of martial law. Music played a visible role in the rallies, from collective singing to the use of K-pop light sticks and the recirculation of “Into the New World” (2007), the debut song of the prominent K-pop girl group Girls’ Generation. In this paper, I argue that K-pop and its largely female fandom practices have transformed South Korean protest culture by translating fan-based solidarity into political solidarity. I analyze how “Into the New World” came to function as a protest anthem and how fan-based cultural practices and responses to women’s political expression facilitated new forms of participation in protest movements.

I demonstrate how contemporary protest practices differ from those of the Gwangju Uprising of 1980, a response to the military coup and martial law under Chun Doo-hwan. Citizens resisted state violence through armed struggle and protest songs, including the national anthem and “March for Our Beloved” (1981). Traumatic memories of this period have shaped later protest practices: rather than confronting authorities through physical conflict, contemporary protesters emphasize solidarity through collective, nonviolent expression.

In the 2016 and 2024 impeachment rallies, “Into the New World” emerged as a powerful protest anthem. Its lyrics such as “Might be an unknown future with obstacles, but I won’t change” and “We can’t give up” were recontextualized as protest slogans, while K-pop light sticks, originally designed for concerts, were repurposed as visual symbols of collective presence. Young women with experience of affective solidarity within K-pop fandoms played a central role in generating political-affective solidarity across diverse backgrounds and sustaining mass participation. In addition to fan-based practices, women’s democratic engagement took shape under constraints on their political expression, as evidenced by the cyberbullying of female singers who implied political solidarity with protesters through fan-communication platforms. This study shows how “Into the New World” and the pressures surrounding women’s political expression jointly reshaped democratic participation in South Korea, signaling a new phase in its ongoing evolution.

Biography

Seoyoon was an active clarinetist who performed professionally throughout her undergraduate studies. She then shifted her focus from performance to analysis and earned her master’s degree in Music Theory at Yonsei University. For her master’s thesis, she analyzed the first movement of Brahms’s Clarinet Sonata Op. 120/1 from Schenkerian perspective, focusing on its non-stereotypical scheme. She is currently working on Debussy’s Première rhapsodie and expanding her research on K-pop and its political and social influences.