“Most of my research projects are the results of things I encounter while I’m at the keyboard, while I’m playing,” Professor Susan McClary says. Before writing her newest book, Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music, she spent a summer learning to perform French harpsichord suites. Photo by Mike Sands.
Last fall, members of a Cleveland ensemble called Burning River Baroque were rehearsing an anonymous string trio that had gone unheard for more than 200 years. The composer’s name was unknown. The score, a bundle of handwritten pages, had been preserved in a German archive since the 18th century but never published. Now, John Romey, a founder of the ensemble and a doctoral student in musicology at Case Western Reserve, had finally brought this music to light, and the group would be giving the premiere at an upcoming concert.
In some ways, it was a challenge to present a work so long neglected. The manuscript was “a mess,” Romey says, riddled with notes that didn’t seem to belong. While many were clearly mistakes, others showed a composer choosing to deviate from the musical conventions of his time. And this piece wasn’t the only one on the program that defied expectations. In a quartet by one of Beethoven’s teachers, Johan Georg Albrechtsberger, a flurry of dissonant notes interrupted a graceful minuet. The outburst lasted for eight measures; then the movement resumed as if nothing had happened. What were the musicians to make of passages like these?
Romey turned to one of his professors, Susan McClary, for guidance. He asked her to read through the scores with the ensemble and offer some coaching. Romey had taken a class with McClary and often sought her advice about his research and writing. She had been generous with her time, and he knew she had worked with other students in rehearsals. So he felt sure she wouldn’t see his request as an imposition.
In fact, McClary spent most of an afternoon with Burning River Baroque. In every piece they examined together, she methodically pointed out details, drawing on her knowledge as a historian, theorist and performer. And she encouraged the players to bring out the startling moments in the scores, to highlight the music’s tensions and disruptions.
“I think that most musicians would say, ‘That note doesn’t sound right—let’s bury it in the texture of the other string parts,’” Romey explains. “But Susan’s idea is, ‘When you play the note, don’t try to hide it. Let people know that something weird is going on.’ By the end of the rehearsal, it was amazing how much our understanding of the music had deepened, and how much the level of our playing had improved.”
He adds, “Susan is really great at diving into the notes, and then getting the performers to express them in a way that’s actually meaningful. Often, theorists get into the business of labeling things: ‘Here’s a tonic harmony.’ But they don’t necessarily tell you why something is there.”
McClary’s entire career has been a quest for explanations. She seeks to understand what makes a piece of music compelling, to identify the habits of thought and feeling embodied in musical forms, and to discern the cultural significance of changes in musical styles. In her best-known book, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, she examined ways in which desire and pleasure, masculinity and femininity have been represented in Western music, beginning with the operas of Claudio Monteverdi in the 17th century and concluding with songs by Madonna.
When Feminine Endings appeared in 1991, it established McClary as the leading practitioner of “critical musicology,” an attempt to interpret music in its historical and cultural context. Four years later, her standing was confirmed when she received the prize that headline writers hail as the “genius grant ”—a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
Clockwise from left: Susan McClary and her colleagues, Debra Nagy and Julie Andrijeski, share a commitment to fostering historically informed, expressive interpretations of early music. Photo by Mike Sands.
“Susan’s profile within the field of musicology is probably unmatched,” says Ross W. Duffin, the Fynette H. Kulas Professor of Music and interim department chair. “There are maybe one or two others who are at the same level. And she’s one of just three MacArthur prizewinners among musicologists worldwide. That is distinguished company indeed. But Susan stands out not simply for her reputation as a musicologist, but also for the originality of her thinking.“
It is no exaggeration to say that McClary has been surrounded by music all her life. Her father began playing classical recordings for her while she was still in her cradle. But he bore little resemblance to those modern-day parents who order “Mozart for Babies” CDs in hopes of boosting their children’s IQ.
Dan McClary had grown up in poverty in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. A Cherokee, he joined an all-Indian regiment during World War II and fought on the front lines in France and Germany. “He was the only one of his group to survive the war,” McClary says. “When he came back, he had the GI Bill, and he managed to get into graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis. He was in the process of making a gargantuan leap, not only with respect to education but also with respect to class identification and culture. And he wanted me to experience what he thought that people of elite culture listened to.”
Her mother, Toccoa Wilson McClary, also came from the “rural underclass” and was striving to achieve “a comfortable academic lifestyle.” She earned advanced degrees in mathematics while her husband completed a doctorate in microbiology. “She wasn’t interested in the music,” McClary recalls, “but she let this strange process unfold nevertheless.”
At the outset, the only classical music her father knew came to him secondhand; his favorite pop songs were based on melodies by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Grieg. “So the first thing he did was to buy the originals,” McClary says. “Then he started asking his colleagues, his fellow graduate students, what he should be listening to. And he played that music to me day and night.”
She adds, “My father wasn’t doing this just because he thought it was something he was supposed to do. He absolutely loved the music. So he and I learned the classical canon together.”
Before long, however, a new world of sound erupted around her. “I was in grade school when rock and roll broke; I was 11 years old when Elvis Presley appeared,” she says. A year before she started college, the Beatles made their American debut. But McClary was only peripherally aware of these developments. “I always felt, as I was growing up, that if I listened to popular music, the edifice my father had built would just collapse, and it would all have been for naught.”
She kept her distance from pop music all the way through college and graduate school. As a piano major at Southern Illinois University, she began coaching other students on how to play Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. As a doctoral candidate at Harvard, she wrote her dissertation on Monteverdi’s stylistic evolution. Monteverdi achieved his early fame as a composer of madrigals—evocative settings of love poems, written for five singers. McClary had been fascinated by these pieces ever since she’d performed them in a high school ensemble. Back then, however, no one had told her how radical Monteverdi’s work seemed to his contemporaries, how inventive he was in finding musical equivalents for intense emotions. Nor had she realized that the lyrics of the madrigals were more blatantly erotic than any of the pop songs she was ignoring; in the editions provided to students, the texts were censored.
It was only much later, when McClary was about to teach her first course on music of the 20th century, that she ended her isolation from popular music. “I realized I could not in good conscience teach the course without incorporating, in a very significant way, jazz, blues, rock and roll, and everything else,” she says. “But I had to study all of that. Much of it was the music of my generation, but I had to study it as though I were learning the 13th-century motet. It was only vaguely familiar. I spent a summer reading everything I could get my hands on, putting together playlists, exactly as I would if I were teaching a course on medieval music.”
Fortunately, McClary was in the early stages of her relationship with her husband, Robert Walser, one of the most prominent scholars of jazz and popular music. “Whenever I was afraid that I was going to say something completely ludicrous, I could run it by him,” she says. “I had an in-house specialist.” Like McClary, Walser joined the Case Western Reserve faculty in 2011.
Her exploration of popular music had a lasting impact on McClary’s scholarship and teaching. First of all, it gave her a new perspective on earlier genres. “I was suddenly forced to think about the body, gender, sexuality, how desire is shaped in music,” she explains. “Many of the things I clearly had to consider when dealing with a pop song went back into the way I then dealt with classical music.”
She also began to write about composers and performers, particularly women, who had been off limits before. By the time she published her second book, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form, what she called “my history of Western music” included not only Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, but also “Bessie Smith and Eric Clapton, k.d. lang, Philip Glass, and Public Enemy.” As a result, she wrote, she found herself “perpetually in awe of the countless ways societies have devised for articulating their most basic beliefs through the medium of sound.”
One morning last fall, McClary introduced her students to an especially powerful example of musical expression. They were about to hear an excerpt from a 12th-century Mass written for the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Two composers from this period, identified in manuscripts as Master Léonin and Pérotin, created a highly embellished style of vocal writing, weaving together as many as four melodic lines. And the parts for the higher voices, soaring above a slow, liturgical chant, lent this music what McClary called a “hypnotic, phantasmagoric” quality.
She told the students that as she prepared for class the night before, she had “blown the house down” playing a recording of Pérotin’s Viderunt Omnes (“All Have Seen”). Now, before they listened together, she described the age in which the piece was written. It was an era that historians call the 12th-century renaissance. McClary spoke of growing cities and their impact on social and economic life in medieval Europe. She mentioned intellectual and artistic advances, the construction of Gothic cathedrals and the founding of great universities.
“Suddenly there was this flourishing of knowledge, an encouragement of the individual imagination that simply had not occurred earlier in Europe, not at least since the fall of Rome,” McClary said. And the encouragement of imagination is one of the things she hears in Pérotin’s music. The basic chant provides “the scaffolding on which the entire composition is built.” But with the addition of those other voices, “it becomes completely inaudible as a melody, and the words have been dissolved.”
McClary taught this lesson during the first semester of a music history survey for undergraduate majors. As they read through the score of Viderunt Omnes, their discussion was fairly technical; the students all had backgrounds in music theory. But they hadn’t necessarily heard this music before. For McClary, the chance to introduce them to unfamiliar repertoires is a chief attraction of teaching the survey.
“To me, this series of innovations, these audacious moves forward that people make, is one of the great achievements of Western culture,” she says. “And I like nothing better than to go through them with students and try to figure out why they came into being at a particular moment.”
The Collegium Musicum, one of the music department’s historical performance practice ensembles, gave a concert this spring at Cleveland’s Trinity Cathedral. Several members of the ensemble have studied with Susan McClary. Front row, from left: violinist Cynthia Black, mezzo-soprano Tracy Cowart and viol player John Romey. Back row, from left: Sian Ricketts, Corey Shotwell and Michael Bane. Photo by Ross Duffin.
At the graduate level, McClary has taught seminars on the Beethoven string quartets, Mozart’s operas and late-Renaissance music from France and Italy. The appeal of these courses extends beyond candidates for advanced degrees in music history. They also attract master’s and doctoral students specializing in performance, both from the department and from the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM).
To Romey, who took the Beethoven seminar, McClary’s approach to the course provided a model for his future teaching. “Susan created a cohesive class,” he explains. “Whether you were a performer or a musicology student, your voice was equal to everyone else’s.”
Outside the classroom, McClary helps judge auditions by undergraduates applying to be music majors, and she works with doctoral students preparing recitals and lectures based on their research. Yet her interactions with students represent only part of her contribution to the department. She chairs a committee responsible for the musicology curriculum and serves on others that oversee the Historical Performance Practice Program and the Joint Music Program with CIM. When Duffin created a task force to review undergraduate offerings in music theory, he wasn’t surprised when McClary volunteered for that assignment, too.
“Susan likes to be involved in things,” Duffin says. “Even though she’s tremendously busy and always under pressure to fly off and give keynote addresses at conferences, she has been a very good citizen.”
Less than two years after her arrival, McClary feels at home at Case Western Reserve. Several of her musicology colleagues have interests allied with hers. For instance, one of Duffin’s specialties is early music theory, and Professor Georgia Cowart has written extensively about music and cultural politics in the court of Louis XIV.
McClary has also found kindred spirits in the department’s Historical Performance Practice Program, including oboist Debra Nagy (GRS ‘07) and violinist Julie Andrijeski (GRS ‘06). Nagy is the founding director of Les Délices, a chamber group specializing in French baroque music. Last year, McClary and Walser hosted a fundraiser for the group at their home in Cleveland Heights.
“Susan’s experience as a performer, and her passion for the music, come through in her writing,” Nagy says. “That isn’t always the case in musicology. In her work on the 17th century, she deals with pieces that look outrageously simple on the page, at least compared to a Mahler symphony. But this music has its own organization and gestures and humor; there is a lot to be understood about it. And Susan is interested in how people experience the music, their emotional and physical response to it, both as performers and as listeners.”
McClary rarely misses a concert by the student musicians, and she was especially impressed with a performance by the Case Western Reserve/CIM Baroque Orchestra this spring. Members of the orchestra stood onstage in Harkness Chapel as they played a French dance suite, and at moments they resembled dancers themselves. First violinist Cynthia Black rose on tiptoe now and then, as if the music were lifting her up. Viola soloist Daniel Batchelder leaned into certain notes as he drew his bow across the strings. The musicians’ gestures helped them communicate both with the audience and with each other. Like the original performers of the suite, they were playing without a conductor, and some of their movements were signals that kept everyone together.
As she reflected on the orchestra’s “astonishing” performance, McClary observed that many young musicians are told to remain still while they play. Now, she draws on historical documents, sculptures and paintings to help students appreciate the extent to which performers in the past were physically engaged in their music making. Andrijeski, who teaches baroque dance as well as early string playing, makes the same point in her classes and rehearsals.
“The students are fortunate to have Julie as a role model,” McClary says. “The ensemble simply exploded with energy.”
It was partly because she had heard too many “uninflected performances” that McClary started writing about music—its cultural meanings, its daring inventions, its occasional explosiveness. She had coached too many players who thought if they just got the notes right, “the music would take care of itself.” So she is delighted to find herself in a community that embraces the vitality and expressive power of her favorite repertoire. “I realized only after I arrived in Cleveland,” she says, “that I had found Early Music Heaven.”