Julie Anne Nord (née Heikel)
Julie Anne Nord's research focuses on orchestration and timbre in the mature works of Richard Wagner. Her dissertation is a study of how Wagner’s "associative orchestration" contributes to music’s role in the drama and his concept of Gesamtkuntswerk. Her research has been supported by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship and she recently received a CGS Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement award to fund her research in Bayreuth, Germany.
Ultimately, Julie's research brings a new dimension to the already rich field of Wagner studies. More significantly, it legitimizes timbre, often overlooked in analysis, as a fundamental element of music. It establishes the orchestra both as a physical and musical object of study, combining historical reception, musical analysis, and socio-cultural analysis with other studies of intertextuality to articulate the emotional and intellectual experience of opera and, more fundamentally, of music.
Her Master’s thesis, “Constructing Chivalry: Symbolic Representation of King Marke in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde,” undertook an examination of Wagner’s adaptation of his source, the Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg, to construct a character that represents the courtly chivalric society of the opera. Julie’s other research interests include music–text relationships and narrativity, nationalism and nationhood in music (specifically nineteenth-century Germany and present-day Canada), folk appropriation in art music, and pedagogical repertoire.
Julie holds musicology and horn performance degrees from McGill University, the University of Victoria, and the University of Michigan. In addition, she holds Associate Diplomas from the Royal Conservatory of Music in both Piano Pedagogy and Horn Performance. Julie has presented her research in Canada, the United States, and the UK at meetings of the American Musicological Society, the International Council for Traditional Music, and the Royal Musical Association.
An active educator in musicology, theory, and performance, Julie challenges her students to make connections between their academic and performance studies, and to share their music with their communities.
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8488-199X
Supervisors: Edmund Goehring and Stephen McClatchie
Ultimately, Julie's research brings a new dimension to the already rich field of Wagner studies. More significantly, it legitimizes timbre, often overlooked in analysis, as a fundamental element of music. It establishes the orchestra both as a physical and musical object of study, combining historical reception, musical analysis, and socio-cultural analysis with other studies of intertextuality to articulate the emotional and intellectual experience of opera and, more fundamentally, of music.
Her Master’s thesis, “Constructing Chivalry: Symbolic Representation of King Marke in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde,” undertook an examination of Wagner’s adaptation of his source, the Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg, to construct a character that represents the courtly chivalric society of the opera. Julie’s other research interests include music–text relationships and narrativity, nationalism and nationhood in music (specifically nineteenth-century Germany and present-day Canada), folk appropriation in art music, and pedagogical repertoire.
Julie holds musicology and horn performance degrees from McGill University, the University of Victoria, and the University of Michigan. In addition, she holds Associate Diplomas from the Royal Conservatory of Music in both Piano Pedagogy and Horn Performance. Julie has presented her research in Canada, the United States, and the UK at meetings of the American Musicological Society, the International Council for Traditional Music, and the Royal Musical Association.
An active educator in musicology, theory, and performance, Julie challenges her students to make connections between their academic and performance studies, and to share their music with their communities.
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8488-199X
Supervisors: Edmund Goehring and Stephen McClatchie
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Talks by Julie Anne Nord (née Heikel)
When Richard Strauss revised and expanded Berlioz’s Treatise on Orchestration in 1904, he identified Wagner’s use of the bass clarinet to express “solemn resignation.” While this resignation is unmistakable in Mark’s Act II lament, Wagner used the bass clarinet throughout the drama to portray larger themes: not only that of King Mark himself, but also of honour and the loss thereof.
In this paper, I identify prominent bass clarinet passages throughout Tristan, and study Wagner’s corresponding libretto and its place in the overall drama. Using this, I demonstrate how it symbolizes first King Mark and then the honour of the chivalric code throughout the opera. By linking both Mark and the loss of Honour to the instrument, Wagner makes them equal entities where one may represent the other over the course of the drama. Ultimately, Wagner’s use of the bass clarinet illustrates Mark’s move from the honour of the chivalric code to the redemption of love through his forgiveness of Tristan and Isolde.
When the composer Richard Wagner titled the second of his Zurich revolutionary essays of 1849 “Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft” (“Art-work of the Future)” he linked his own philosophy of music to that Ludwig Feuerbach’s 1843 treatise “Grundsätzes der Philosophie der Zukunft” (“Principles of the Philosophy of the Future”). His title and the accompanying dedication to the philosopher, who was seven years his senior, serve as an indicator of Wagner’s involvement in the German Vormärz and 1849 revolution. On 14th May 1849, while fleeing to exile in Zurich, Wagner wrote his wife, Minna:
“People of our sort are not destined for this terrible task. We are revolutionaries only in order to build on fresh soil; it is re-creation that attracts us, not destruction, which is why we are not the people whom fate requires. These will arise from the very lowest dregs of society; we and our hearts can have nothing in common with them. You see? Thus do I bid farewell to revolution …”
This paper uses Wagner’s “Art-Work of the Future” and its basis in Feuerbach’s “Philosophy of the Future” to illustrate that Wagner did not, in fact, leave the revolution behind when he left Germany, despite his claims otherwise. First I will provide some background regarding Wagner’s involvement in the 1849 Revolutions; next, I will provide a brief synopsis of each work, comparing their form and content in an attempt to track the influence of Feuerbach’s “Principles of the Philosophy of the Future” on Wagner’s “Art-work of the Future” and, by extension, the composer’s involvement with the Revolution and his broader evolution of his philosophy.
Wagner’s claims that he had left behind the revolution are weak when considered in context of his essays from the same year of his letter to Minna. Yes, Wagner was physically forced to leave Germany, the Revolution, and all reasonable hope for the manifestation of the Young Hegelian idealists, but he brought with him the writings of Feuerbach and the Philosophy of the Future. Wagner believed that art had the power to unite the Volk in ways that the Dresden Uprising was unable. Grappling with his disillusionment of the failures of the 1849 revolutions, Wagner continued to ruminate on the hope that Feuerbach had given the radicals. Despite his desire to renounce the revolution in letters to his wife as he fled and then later in his memoirs, Mein Leben, Wagner made no attempts to conceal the influence that Feuerbach had on The Art-Work of the Future. The dedication of the Original Edition is addressed to “Ludwig Feuerbach, with grateful esteem” as an offering to restore to [Feuerbach his] own property, saying that the property had now become that of the artist. Whether property of the philosopher or the self-proclaimed universal artist, Wagner is clear that his thoughts on Art rose from the realization that “it is not the individual, but only the community, that can bring artistic deeds to actual accomplishment, past any doubting of the senses.” Wagner’s Art-Work of the Future inherited and continued the spirit of the Philosophy of the Future; a fact that he did not deny, nor could he conceal.
In _Bach's cycle, Mozart's arrow: an essay on the origins of musical modernity_, Karol Berger describes how art music’s depiction of the flow of time reflects European society’s imagination and perception of time. He posits that it was only in the later eighteenth-century that music began to consider the flow of time seriously as a progression of past to future. Comparing Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion to Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Berger shows how the “cycle of time” unbends into the “arrow” of linear time. What Berger does not address, however, is the way that the very same mozartian opera that illustrates linear time coming into fruition in European thought and aesthetic, also encompasses a more complex temporal paradigm: the folding of time.
This ability for opera to beautifully depict varying emotions and narratives simultaneously contrasts with David Greene’s picture of music as a successive entity that embodies temporal processes. This folding of time in the realm of opera calls for an additional consideration to Greene’s treatment of instrumental music in Temporal Processes in Beethoven’s Music: the libretto. The inclusion of simultaneous text raises the question of temporality in narrative which, according to David Carr, involves “more than certain temporal organization of events.”
This paper considers Mozart’s folding of time in the ensemble finales of his three operatic collaborations with the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte: _The Marriage of Figaro_, _Don Giovanni_, and _Cosí fan tutte_. Drawing on the previous work of Berger, Greene, and Carr, I study the ways in which Mozart's folding of time affects the operatic narrative, reflecting the philosophical views of temporality in the eighteenth century, and ultimately altering the trajectory of dramatic narrative.
Recruitment ballads are a patriotic call for the loyalty of a people. The issue, however, is who are we being called to follow and at what cost?
Traditional versions of the recruitment ballad “Over the Hills” reference British battles and insinuate recruitment propaganda. From the versions of Thomas D’Urfey (Pills to Purge Melancholy 1706) and George Farquahr (The Recruiting Officer 1706) to the one featured in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), this song retained little common ground apart from its tune and title line. While D’Urfey and Gay’s lyrics pertain to parting lovers, various extant versions of Farquhar’s text raise the question of which war is being fought for whose crown.
Bob Hallett’s adaptation of “Over the Hills” on Great Big Sea’s tenth album, Safe Upon the Shore (2010), challenges Canada’s political allegiances. When considered in light of the band’s earlier recording of Hallett’s adaptation of “The Recruiting Sergeant” (on the album Play, 1997), these songs paint an ironic picture of Newfoundland’s role within confederation, the commonwealth, and the world. From Hallett’s references to recruiting soldiers (both male and female), Afghanistan, and the people’s debt to “the crown” and the Queen, Great Big Sea’s “Over the Hills” challenges Newfoundland’s identity while fighting other nations’ wars, in the post-colonial world. The reference to the brotherhood of French and English carries the issue beyond that of Newfoundland identity to Canadian identity in relation to and apart from that of Britain and the United States in times of war. What began as a patriotic recruitment anthem in the British Isles has transformed to an ironic call for a national reassessment of Canada and Newfoundland’s “debt to the crown’: foreign imperial entanglements."
Structurally, Op. 90 is one of only six Beethoven piano sonatas to only have two movements. The main compositional issue posed by two-movement works is always one of coherence and completeness. This issue of writing a complete two-movement work can be met in one of two ways. According to Kenneth Drake, the piece can either represent a journey where the first movement leads the listener away from a given a point and a second leads them back, or the two movements can be presented as contrasts of each other, much like contrasting movements in a dance suite. In both cases, the composer has to be mindful in his use of elements of cohesiveness and continuity to tie these movements together for one complete form. With Op. 90 Beethoven draws upon on the latter method and provides a composition with contrasting movements. Beethoven’s delicate manipulation and treatment of dynamics and articulation, harmony and root motion, form and tempo in the Op. 90 piano sonata all combine to create a perfect balance of cohesive duality.
Papers by Julie Anne Nord (née Heikel)
When Richard Strauss revised and expanded Berlioz’s Treatise on Orchestration in 1904, he identified Wagner’s use of the bass clarinet to express “solemn resignation.” While this resignation is unmistakable in Mark’s Act II lament, Wagner used the bass clarinet throughout the drama to portray larger themes: not only that of King Mark himself, but also of honour and the loss thereof.
In this paper, I identify prominent bass clarinet passages throughout Tristan, and study Wagner’s corresponding libretto and its place in the overall drama. Using this, I demonstrate how it symbolizes first King Mark and then the honour of the chivalric code throughout the opera. By linking both Mark and the loss of Honour to the instrument, Wagner makes them equal entities where one may represent the other over the course of the drama. Ultimately, Wagner’s use of the bass clarinet illustrates Mark’s move from the honour of the chivalric code to the redemption of love through his forgiveness of Tristan and Isolde.
When the composer Richard Wagner titled the second of his Zurich revolutionary essays of 1849 “Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft” (“Art-work of the Future)” he linked his own philosophy of music to that Ludwig Feuerbach’s 1843 treatise “Grundsätzes der Philosophie der Zukunft” (“Principles of the Philosophy of the Future”). His title and the accompanying dedication to the philosopher, who was seven years his senior, serve as an indicator of Wagner’s involvement in the German Vormärz and 1849 revolution. On 14th May 1849, while fleeing to exile in Zurich, Wagner wrote his wife, Minna:
“People of our sort are not destined for this terrible task. We are revolutionaries only in order to build on fresh soil; it is re-creation that attracts us, not destruction, which is why we are not the people whom fate requires. These will arise from the very lowest dregs of society; we and our hearts can have nothing in common with them. You see? Thus do I bid farewell to revolution …”
This paper uses Wagner’s “Art-Work of the Future” and its basis in Feuerbach’s “Philosophy of the Future” to illustrate that Wagner did not, in fact, leave the revolution behind when he left Germany, despite his claims otherwise. First I will provide some background regarding Wagner’s involvement in the 1849 Revolutions; next, I will provide a brief synopsis of each work, comparing their form and content in an attempt to track the influence of Feuerbach’s “Principles of the Philosophy of the Future” on Wagner’s “Art-work of the Future” and, by extension, the composer’s involvement with the Revolution and his broader evolution of his philosophy.
Wagner’s claims that he had left behind the revolution are weak when considered in context of his essays from the same year of his letter to Minna. Yes, Wagner was physically forced to leave Germany, the Revolution, and all reasonable hope for the manifestation of the Young Hegelian idealists, but he brought with him the writings of Feuerbach and the Philosophy of the Future. Wagner believed that art had the power to unite the Volk in ways that the Dresden Uprising was unable. Grappling with his disillusionment of the failures of the 1849 revolutions, Wagner continued to ruminate on the hope that Feuerbach had given the radicals. Despite his desire to renounce the revolution in letters to his wife as he fled and then later in his memoirs, Mein Leben, Wagner made no attempts to conceal the influence that Feuerbach had on The Art-Work of the Future. The dedication of the Original Edition is addressed to “Ludwig Feuerbach, with grateful esteem” as an offering to restore to [Feuerbach his] own property, saying that the property had now become that of the artist. Whether property of the philosopher or the self-proclaimed universal artist, Wagner is clear that his thoughts on Art rose from the realization that “it is not the individual, but only the community, that can bring artistic deeds to actual accomplishment, past any doubting of the senses.” Wagner’s Art-Work of the Future inherited and continued the spirit of the Philosophy of the Future; a fact that he did not deny, nor could he conceal.
In _Bach's cycle, Mozart's arrow: an essay on the origins of musical modernity_, Karol Berger describes how art music’s depiction of the flow of time reflects European society’s imagination and perception of time. He posits that it was only in the later eighteenth-century that music began to consider the flow of time seriously as a progression of past to future. Comparing Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion to Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Berger shows how the “cycle of time” unbends into the “arrow” of linear time. What Berger does not address, however, is the way that the very same mozartian opera that illustrates linear time coming into fruition in European thought and aesthetic, also encompasses a more complex temporal paradigm: the folding of time.
This ability for opera to beautifully depict varying emotions and narratives simultaneously contrasts with David Greene’s picture of music as a successive entity that embodies temporal processes. This folding of time in the realm of opera calls for an additional consideration to Greene’s treatment of instrumental music in Temporal Processes in Beethoven’s Music: the libretto. The inclusion of simultaneous text raises the question of temporality in narrative which, according to David Carr, involves “more than certain temporal organization of events.”
This paper considers Mozart’s folding of time in the ensemble finales of his three operatic collaborations with the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte: _The Marriage of Figaro_, _Don Giovanni_, and _Cosí fan tutte_. Drawing on the previous work of Berger, Greene, and Carr, I study the ways in which Mozart's folding of time affects the operatic narrative, reflecting the philosophical views of temporality in the eighteenth century, and ultimately altering the trajectory of dramatic narrative.
Recruitment ballads are a patriotic call for the loyalty of a people. The issue, however, is who are we being called to follow and at what cost?
Traditional versions of the recruitment ballad “Over the Hills” reference British battles and insinuate recruitment propaganda. From the versions of Thomas D’Urfey (Pills to Purge Melancholy 1706) and George Farquahr (The Recruiting Officer 1706) to the one featured in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), this song retained little common ground apart from its tune and title line. While D’Urfey and Gay’s lyrics pertain to parting lovers, various extant versions of Farquhar’s text raise the question of which war is being fought for whose crown.
Bob Hallett’s adaptation of “Over the Hills” on Great Big Sea’s tenth album, Safe Upon the Shore (2010), challenges Canada’s political allegiances. When considered in light of the band’s earlier recording of Hallett’s adaptation of “The Recruiting Sergeant” (on the album Play, 1997), these songs paint an ironic picture of Newfoundland’s role within confederation, the commonwealth, and the world. From Hallett’s references to recruiting soldiers (both male and female), Afghanistan, and the people’s debt to “the crown” and the Queen, Great Big Sea’s “Over the Hills” challenges Newfoundland’s identity while fighting other nations’ wars, in the post-colonial world. The reference to the brotherhood of French and English carries the issue beyond that of Newfoundland identity to Canadian identity in relation to and apart from that of Britain and the United States in times of war. What began as a patriotic recruitment anthem in the British Isles has transformed to an ironic call for a national reassessment of Canada and Newfoundland’s “debt to the crown’: foreign imperial entanglements."
Structurally, Op. 90 is one of only six Beethoven piano sonatas to only have two movements. The main compositional issue posed by two-movement works is always one of coherence and completeness. This issue of writing a complete two-movement work can be met in one of two ways. According to Kenneth Drake, the piece can either represent a journey where the first movement leads the listener away from a given a point and a second leads them back, or the two movements can be presented as contrasts of each other, much like contrasting movements in a dance suite. In both cases, the composer has to be mindful in his use of elements of cohesiveness and continuity to tie these movements together for one complete form. With Op. 90 Beethoven draws upon on the latter method and provides a composition with contrasting movements. Beethoven’s delicate manipulation and treatment of dynamics and articulation, harmony and root motion, form and tempo in the Op. 90 piano sonata all combine to create a perfect balance of cohesive duality.