Topics in 20th and 21st Century Music

For our midterm project, students did archival research at UVA's Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library about the beginnings of UVA's music department in 1921. Our research focused on three topics: Arthur Fickenscher: the inaugural chair of UVA's music department, Fickenscher invented a microtonal keyboard called the "Polytone" that is now displayed in UVA's music library. Fickenscher was also an active community musician: he was music director for an early iteration of UVA's glee club, as well as the Christ Episcopal Church in Charlottesville. John Powell: a concert pianist, composer, ethnomusicologist, and UVA alumnus, Powell was an influential musical and political thinker in 1920s Virginia. Powell is now well-known for his white-supremacist beliefs and was an active figure in drafting and promoting Virginia's 1924 Racial Integrity Act. A musical pageant performed to honor the UVA centennial in 1921. Fickenscher music directed the pageant, while Powell composed an overture for it. Titled "In the Shadow of the Builder," the pageant tells the story of Jefferson designing UVA's architecture, and it featured an ensemble of female "Greek dancers," decades before women were admitted to UVA. During their research students engaged with a variety of archival artifacts, including handwritten letters, newspaper articles, concert programs and posters, photographs, and UVA's 1921 yearbook. Their blog posts put these archival objects into conversation and connect their objects to themes discussed in class including musical modernism, nationalism, race, and colonialism.

UVA McIntire Amphitheater, April 22, 2025, 6-7PM "Happenings" were midcentury multimedia performance art events that often included improvisation, audience participation, and multiple performances happening at once. In today's Happening, students will present their own interpretations of "text scores" by Yoko Ono, John Cage, and Michael Pisaro. Text scores such as John Cage's 4'33" use words, rather than musical notation, to direct the performance of a musical work. In doing so, text scores make musical performance accessible to anyone. You may be asked to participate in a piece, and please be aware that occasional loud sounds may occur. Program notes for each piece can be found below. Enjoy! Many thanks to Joel Jacobus and Alex Christie for their help with this event.