Congratulations to the 2022-23 Cykler Song Scholar Winners, Annie Liu (Musicology) and Camila Osses (Piano)!
This award serves to provide financial support and mentorship to graduate students interested in pursuing original research related to song and to encourage the exploration of underexplored song repertoire. Annie and Camila will be provided a $6000 research award and mentorship from Stephen Rodgers, Edmund A. Cykler Chair in Music and Professor of Music Theory and Musicianship, over the course of the 2022/23 academic year.
Annie Liu
About Annie's Project:
In my project, I will focus on Shanghai's popular songs from the 1920s-40s, a genre that blended Chinese folk songs and instruments, American jazz, Western orchestral instruments, Peking opera-style singing, bel canto singing, and Western dances like foxtrots or tangos. My work will explore how this cosmopolitan genre fits within a broader picture of jazz diaspora in the early twentieth century, the fetishization of Western culture, auto-exoticism or Orientalism, nationalism, and gender dynamics in the performing arts.
Camila Osses
About Camila's Project "Songs of Carmela Mackenna":
I will research the art song of Chilean female composer Carmela Mackenna, a prolific composer of the twentieth century. Mackenna wrote sets of art song with texts of Paul Verlaine, Pablo Neruda, and others, and also wrote music for piano, choir, orchestra, and chamber music. I will explore her art songs in terms of style, technique, and philosophy. The product of this research will be a professional recording of ten songs, along with a performance edition (music score) with program notes, information about the composer and indications for performance.
I feel encouraged to bring this work to the music community because the music of female composers needs to be heard and appreciated, and because as a musician I am eager to discover "new music", that music that has been kept in an archive and which we do not know how it sounds.