Zen Kuriyama

Recording of an invited talk I gave virtually at the University of St Andrews (UK) on 11 February 2023.

Above is the official promotional poster for a Finzi celebration held at the University of St Andrews on 11 Feb 2023. I was one of two speakers (the other being the eminent Finzi biographer, Diana McVeagh).

Boydell & Brewer Press publicized the event here.

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Below is the abstract for my book chapter, “RESIGNATION and Virgil Thomson’s Hymns from the Old South,” for the peer-reviewed scholarly volume, Christian Sacred Music in the Americas. The book was published by Rowman & Littlefield in February 2021 and edited by Andrew Shenton (Boston University) and Joanna Smolko (University of Georgia).

RESIGNATION and Virgil Thomson’s Hymns from the Old South

Zen Kuriyama

Virgil Thomson’s Hymns from the Old South is a collection of four Southern hymn-tune arrangements published as separate octavos in 1949. While well known today (somewhat infamously) for his scathing music criticism, Thomson was also a prolific composer. Integral to understanding Thomson’s idiosyncratic musical language and his contribution to American classical music is the influence of shape-note hymnody, which reached full maturity in the composition of Hymns from the Old South (also known as Four Southern Folk Hymns). This shape-note seed planting began in 1937 when the composer was commissioned to write music for The River, a documentary film on the Mississippi River and its environmental threats. In The River, listeners hear a tune several times that becomes eerily familiar and haunting. Thomson came across this tune, titled RESIGNATION, in an 1854 edition of William Walker’s Southern Harmony, which served as the inspiration for his Hymns from the Old South over a decade later. 

My analysis of Thomson’s anthem “My Shepherd Will Supply My Need” (set to the RESIGNATION tune) will be in two parts: inspiration and synthesis. Thomson was not alone in drawing inspiration from shape-note hymnody; American composers Aaron Copland and Randall Thompson likewise integrated the singable and spirit-filled melodies of shape-note hymns into their compositions. In my analysis, however, I will argue that Thomson’s synthesis of the RESIGNATION tune is distinct, most notably in his particular use of harmony, contrapuntal texture, affect, and declamation. An excursus on reception / performance notes for concert or liturgical service follows, reframing the analytical mode of this study into one concerning issues of functional programming, performance practice, and significance to the sacred music canon. A brief overview of the critical reception of Hymns from the Old South is also provided, underscored by additional comments on its place within Christian worship by prominent American church musicians, thereby situating this work within the aesthetic tastes of twentieth-century American sacred music.

Englishness, Jewishness, and the English Sound:

Gerald Finzi and the English Musical Renaissance

Dissertation Prospectus for the PhD in musicology  [EXCERPT]

Department of Music

Brandeis University 

Waltham, MA, USA

Zen Kuriyama

[This PhD diss prospectus was defended and accepted by the musicology faculty in April 2021. Below is an excerpt from the document.]

State-of-the-Art and Rationale

           Reception history in music has never been kind to the ‘other’ in society. Of all the types of discrimination, antisemitism has been a particularly vicious yet elusive creature, especially in Britain. The complexity lies in Jewishness; it can be a religious faith, an ethnicity, or a nationhood. Oftentimes, all three at once. Unlike the recusant Catholic composers in Tudor England like Tallis and Byrd who hid their faith while composing for the Protestant monarchs, hiding Jewishness would indeed be an act of hiding the whole self. According to both Stephen Banfield and Diana McVeagh in their biographies on the composer, this happened in various shades in the life of Gerald Finzi (1901--1956), the nominally “first-rate-second-rate” English composer. There is, however, a gap in the scholarship. No study has yet analyzed anti-Jewish sentiment in England against the immediate backdrop of the so-called English Musical Renaissance (1850--1950) with the goal of explaining how Finzi’s highly idiosyncratic compositional language was forged in this very context. My dissertation seeks to fill in this lacuna.

           The post-war decades saw a great deal of scholarly discussion on this topic, as well. Scholars such as Geoffrey Alderman, Kenneth Lunn, and Tony Kushner began publishing widely in the 1980s on “Antisemitism in Britain” during and between the World Wars, which--at the time--had been a groundbreaking discussion in academe. The complexity and contentious feelings around these debates had nothing to do with acknowledging and proving prejudice, but rather on the sources and proponents of this prejudice. Kushner and Alderman not only blamed the “Britain First” mentality that sprouted forth after the First World War, but the amalgamation of several strong and tense national factors that led to a type of virulent and multifaceted antisemitism. 

           My dissertation examines the struggle between Finzi’s Englishness and Jewishness, and how this fortified a highly idiosyncratic melodic and harmonic language as seen in his songs, choral music, and works for chamber orchestra. The musicologist Stephen Banfield has labelled Finzi's music as "quintessentially English," yet he is not recognized in the literature as being a prominent figure in the English Musical Renaissance, a musical and nationalistic movement that advocated for an “English sound.” My argument is that, even though Gerald Finzi himself was not a practicing Jew, the fact that he came from a well-known Sephardic Jewish family in Italy adversely affected his reception in Britain. The latent (and oftentimes overt) antisemitism in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century has been explored in scholarship, but not yet in detail in application to Finzi. The effects of antisemitism and anti-Jewish sentiment became a self-inflicted and open wound which Finzi carried around his entire life. Extraordinarily, I posit that Finzi harnessed and digested these harrowing emotions and transfigured them into a sonic manifestation of defiance; if he as a person could never be truly English, his music certainly would. My project, then, seeks both to rectify and fill in a lacuna in twentieth-century British music scholarship. By scrutinizing the often-antithetical Judeo-Christian milieu in which this composer found himself, I will give credence to his idiosyncratic and emblematic nationalistic musical language that was empirically snuffed out because of cultural prejudices.

            The cornerstone of this study will be an analysis of what I have labelled to be Finzi’s “neo-Tudor free polyphony” compositional technique. This will be done thoroughly (see Chapters 4, 5, & 6) using the newly-established tool of Finzi’s clandestine and even embarrassed Jewish heritage that fortified a musical language that should be recognized as the crowning jewel of the “English Sound” that resulted from a century of pioneering music-making on the island.

Program notes I wrote for Musica Sacra New York’s performance of Handel’s Messiah at Carnegie Hall, December 23, 2019 (as published in Playbill).

Program notes I wrote for Musica Sacra New York’s ‘Music for a Gothic Space’ concert. Monday, 21 October 2019 at 7:30pm at The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, NYC. Kent Tritle, conductor.

“Ritualizing the Passion: Hermeneutics, Theology, and Religious Affect in Peter Sellars’s 2010 St Matthew Passion.” Kuriyama, 2019.

Conference paper review by the Royal Musical Association:

“…several international delegates were present, and a good number of young academics in the early stages of their careers attended. This all contributed to a lively conference atmosphere with stimulating discussion throughout the day.

The conference papers were divided into three themed sessions, with a concluding keynote presentation. Ian Maxwell (Cambridge University) and Zen Kuriyama (University of Notre Dame) both gave excellent papers in the first session; both were broadly concerned with, in the word of Maxwell, ‘the extent to which Anglican Church music fundamentally informed and directed the underlying stylistic features that identify “Englishness”.’…”

https://www.rma.ac.uk/2019/01/15/conference-review-emr-and-the-church-durham-university-5-nov-2018/?fbclid=IwAR3DUvxWcmTXt-5jGY2c0PBMWeNHwL-tis30wIjri2Rb7Bk6qT_b9JsDosE

“Reshaping Musical History: Gerald Finzi and the English Musical Renaissance.” Zen Kuriyama. Journal article publication. Published in The Finzi Journal (UK), December 2018.

Presenting on the musico-theological aspects of BWV 25, Es ist nichts Gesundes an meinem Leibe, University of Notre Dame, April 2018.