ABOUT THIS PRESENTATION
“Late style” is a longstanding aesthetic category in all the arts. Late-style music is presumed to have certain internal qualities (such as fragmentation, intimacy, nostalgia, or concision) and to be associated with certain external factors (such as the age of the composer, his or her proximity to and foreknowledge of death).
Music composed late in life is better understood in relation to the experience of living in an old body, with its attendant challenges and affordances. In a musical style I call “composing oldly,” composers inscribe their bodily experiences into their music. Close readings of four modernist works serve to illuminate the concept: Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles; Schoenberg's String Trio; Bartók's Third Piano Concerto; and Copland's Night Thoughts. In each case, I contend that the features of these works generally understood as markers of lateness are better understood in relation to the old bodies of their composers. This perspective invites us to reconsider how age, embodiment, and musical expression intersect, and to attend more closely to the creative possibilities of composing in later life.
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Joseph N Straus
Distinguished Professor of Music Theory
City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center
Joseph Straus is Distinguished Professor of Music Theory at the CUNY Graduate Center. With a specialization in music since 1900, he has written numerous technical music-theoretical articles and scholarly monographs on a variety of topics in modernist music, including Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1990), The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Stravinsky’s Late Music (Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Twelve-Tone Music in America (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
He has also written a series of articles and books that engage disability as a cultural practice, including Extraordinary Measures: Music and Disability (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Broken Beauty: Musical Modernism and the Representation of Disability (Oxford University Press, 2018). His most recent book is Cultural Narratives of Old Age in the Lives, Work, and Reception of Old Musicians (Routledge, 2025). He has also written textbooks that have become standard references, including Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory, now in its fourth edition, and Concise Introduction to Tonal Harmony (co-authored with Poundie Burstein). Many of his books and articles have received publication awards from the Society for Music Theory, of which he was President from 1997–99.