Associate Professor (Music Theory)
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Office: CAC 3043 Amy Bauer's research focuses on twentieth-century music, especially the music of György Ligeti, spectral music and issues surrounding the reception and analysis of contemporary music. |
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Amy Bauer has published on the music of Ligeti, Messiaen, the television musical, and on issues in the reception and theory of modernist music. In addition she has given papers at national and international conferences on the music of Miles Davis, Mary Lou Williams, opera, television serials and cross-cultural issues in twentieth century music. Her monograph Ligeti's Laments: Nostalgia, Exoticism and the Absolute (Ashgate, Nov. 2011) provides a critical analysis of the composer's works, considering both the compositions themselves and the larger cultural implications of their reception. She both synthesizes and challenges the prevailing narratives surrounding the composer's long career and uses the theme of lament to inform a discussion of specific musical topics, including descending melodic motives, passacaglia and the influence of folk music. But Ligeti 'laments' in a larger sense; his music fuses rigour and sensuality, tradition and the new and influences from disparate high and low cultures, with a certain critical and ironic distance, reflected in his spoken commentary as well as in the substance of his music. The notions of nostalgia, exoticism and the absolute are used to relate works of different eras and genres, along with associated concepts of allegory, melancholy, contemporary subjectivity and the voice.
Prior to joining the faculty at UC Irvine Bauer taught at Washington University, West Chester University, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Research Interests
György Ligeti, spectral music, psychoanalysis, cross-cultural influence in music, interdisciplinary approaches to music analysis, critical theory, popular music and jazz theory.
Teaching
Undergraduate music theory and analysis, graduate analysis, various seminar topics in post-1945 music, rhythmic theory, Schenkerian analysis, history of theory, cross-cultural influences in music, world music, theory of non-Western music, readings in contemporary music theory.
Upcoming lectures
"The Cosmopolitan Imagination in Ligeti’s Late Works," Ligeti's Later Music, Institute of Musical Research, University of London, Mar 30, 2012
"The mysteries of David Lang’s The Difficulty of Crossing a Field," Perceptual Tensions, Sensory Resonance: Contemporary Opera and New Music Theatre, University of Toronto, June 8–9, 2012
"The Cosmopolitan Imagination in Ligeti’s Wëores Songs," 19th International Musicological Society 2012 Rome Congress, July 1–7, 2012
Selected Publications
Books:
Ligeti's Laments: Nostalgia, Exoticism and the Absolute (Ashgate, 2011)
Articles and book chapters:
“Ligeti’s Lament and the Spiritual Other,” in Contemporary Music and Spirituality, Sander van Maas and Robert Sholl, eds. (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, forthcoming)
"Tone-color, movement, changing harmonic planes: Cognition, Constraints and Conceptual Blends in Modernist Music," The Pleasure of Modernism: Intention, Meaning, and the Compositional Avant-Garde, Arved Ashby, editor, (Rochester: Eastman Studies in Music, 2004), 121–52.
"'Composing the Sound itself;' Secondary Parameters and Structure in the Music of Ligeti," Indiana Theory Review, Volume 22, no. 1 (Spring 2001), 37-64.
Reviews
György Ligeti: Music of the Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), twentieth-century music, Vo. 2, No. 2, (September 2005), 302-309.
Capriccio Nr. 1 /Invention /Capriccio Nr. 2 for piano (1947-48), and Ricercare per organo (1953) by György Ligeti, MLA Notes (March 1995)