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Phone: 831-459-5585
Fax: 831-459-5584
E-mail: abeal@ucsc.edu
Ph.D. in Historical Musicology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
M.M. in Piano Performance, University of Kansas, Lawrence
B.M. in Piano Performance, University of Kansas, Lawrence
Amy C. Beal teaches and studies American and twentieth-century music history and performance practice. Her recent publications (in The Journal of the American Musicological Society, American Music, and The Musical Quarterly) explore the history and historiography of American experimental music. Beal has been the recipient of the Society for American Music's Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award and the American Musicological Society's Alfred Einstein Article Award. Originally trained as a classical pianist, Beal currently leads the UCSC Contemporary Music Ensemble and performs locally with several new music groups and Indonesian gamelan ensembles. She remains professionally active in the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, and the College Music Society. She has recently completed a book on the history of American music in West Germany from 1945-1990.
When I started studying twentieth-century American music history I became intrigued by the whole notion of “American experimental music,” and I started exploring a series of research questions: Was American experimentalism a “tradition” and if so, how was that “tradition” defined? What were its origins? Who first called it that? What did they mean? Was this music based on compositional decisions? Or on attitudes about life and art? Did it have to do with the music itself, or rather with the professional situation of the composers? Was it about performance, recording, publishing, distribution? Was it a matter of reception? Or historiography? Was it about rejecting the notion of The Masterpiece? Was it about rethinking the relationship between composers, performers, and audiences? Was it about indeterminacy, processes, tuning systems, and technology? Was it about non-conformism? Could it be about all of these things? My attempts to answer these questions have led me to compare the systems of support for new music in the United States and Europe (in particular, West Germany) since the end of the Second World War.
My recent teaching and performing activities reflect my interest in flexible, interactive, improvisatory experimental music. In the last few years I have been involved in performances of music by Karl Berger, Johanna Beyer, Henry Brant, Michael Byron, John Cage, Philip Corner, Alvin Curran, Jody Diamond, Morton Feldman, Fred Frith, Daniel Goode, Lou Harrison, Benjamin Lees, Pauline Oliveros, Larry Polansky, Frederic Rzewski, Erik Satie, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Igor Stravinsky, James Tenney, Christian Wolff, and new works by graduate student composers.
New Music, New Allies—American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (California Studies in Twentieth-Century Music 4, University of California Press, spring 2006).
“A Place to Ply Their Wares With Dignity: American Composer-Performers in West Germany, 1972,” Musical Quarterly Volume 86, No. 2 (summer 2002): 327-346.
“The Army, the Airwaves, and the Avant-Garde: American Classical Music in Postwar West Germany,” American Music Volume 21, No. 4 (winter 2003): 474-513.
“Time Canvasses: Morton Feldman and the Painters of the New York School,” in Modern Art and Music (Border Crossings). James Leggio, ed. (New York: Routledge Publishing, 2002), 227-245.
“Negotiating Cultural Allies: American Music in Darmstadt, 1946-1956,” in Journal of the American Musicological Society, Volume 53, No. 1 (spring 2000): 105-139.
Twentieth-century music; American music; contemporary music ensemble; contemporary music performance practice; improvised and experimental music.
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