Volume 65, No. 2

Articles: Scholarship and Research

• Burnout among University Music Faculty in the United States
  Brenda Wristen
  Abstract

  | https://doi.org/10.18177/sym.2025.65.sr.11675

  Burnout has been documented in a variety of countries among postsecondary educators, but studies of college/university music faculty are sparse. The researcher examined the experience of burnout across three dimensions—Emotional Exhaustion (EE), Depersonalization (DP), and Personal Accomplishment (PA)—among 310 college/university music faculty across the United States and explored demographic characteristics that predicted scores in each dimension. Burnout rates were significantly higher among the music faculty compared to a normative population, with EE demonstrating the strongest effect size. Stepwise multiple regression identified several demographic characteristics as predictive of burnout in the various burnout dimensions. While both more teaching hours and more hours at all employment predicted higher EE scores, being older, working at a four-year private institution, teaching associate degree-seeking students, and assistant professor rank predicted lower emotional exhaustion. More teaching hours, more hours at all employment, and being married cohabitating with spouse predicted higher DP while increasing age and Assistant Professor rank predicted lower DP. Finally, increasing age, pretenure status, and being single but living with others raised PA, thus protecting against burnout. Music faculty teaching at four-year public colleges/universities experienced significantly higher EE, a finding moderated both by number of hours spent on teaching activities, and total number of hours spent working at all employment per week. Taken together, results suggest that teaching more hours per week, working more hours per week at all employment, and teaching at a four-year public institution heighten the risk for burnout among music faculty.

• With Love from Z to A: Fibich’s Love Diary for Piano
  John K. Novak
  Abstract

  | https://doi.org/10.18177/sym.2025.65.sr.11693

  Zdeněk Fibich (1850-1900) was a leading composer of Czech music in the later nineteenth century. Although his operas and other works are still performed regularly in the Czech Republic, his music is little known in the United States. Among his most remarkable works is the collection of 376 piano pieces in four sets that he collectively called Moods, Impressions and Reminders. These pieces are miniature tone poems, all of which deal with Fibich’s lover and former piano student, Aněžka Schulzová. While some of the pieces describe episodes in their lives together, many of them attempt to illustrate Aněžka’s physical attributes from head to toe, one piece at a time. These intensely personal and sensual miniatures form a musical diary that Fibich “kept” for nine years. None of the pieces, however, contain titles or any extra-musical references. Aněžka herself revealed their meanings to music critic Zdeněk Nejedlý after Fibich’s death. The collection is a compendium of Fibich’s musical style and a guide to the emotions of his inner life.
  This article explores both musical and extra-musical aspects of seven representative pieces. Their themes include Fibich’s “love confession” to Aněžka, the union of their two hearts, an evening together on the island of Žofin in the Moldau (better known as Fibich’s “Poème”), a fast train ride, and miniature portraits of Aněžka’s eyelashes, eyebrows, and nose!

• Diabolical Dances and Rhythmic Poetry: Interpreting and Performing Franz Liszt’s Metric Conflicts
  Robert L. Wells
  Abstract

  | https://doi.org/10.18177/sym.2025.65.sr.11692

  The technical and musical difficulties of Franz Liszt’s piano music are well known, from rapid octaves and tricky leaps to complex musical structures unified by thematic transformation. Often overlooked in these discussions, however, are Liszt’s radical approaches to rhythm and meter, which provide significant interpretive and performative challenges. Particularly noteworthy are Liszt’s uses of metrical dissonance or metric conflict, in which the meter we hear contradicts the notated time signature and barring. Through close examinations of metric conflict in Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz Nos. 3–4, Pensée des morts, and Totentanz, this article seeks to investigate two primary questions: (1) What practical strategies can facilitate effective performances of metric conflict in Liszt’s piano music? (2) What musical stories does Liszt tell through rhythm and meter, and how can our performance decisions help convey and sustain these narratives? From these explorations will emerge five practical strategies for interpreting and performing metric conflict in Liszt’s piano music, which could have additional applications beyond Liszt and piano performance. This article’s investigations also seek, more broadly, to help narrow the gap between formal music-theoretic discourse on rhythm and meter and the practical needs of the performing musician.

• Transcribing French Baroque Guitar for Classical Guitar: Semi Re-Entrant Tuning in Robert de Visée’s Suite in D Minor (1686)
  Arash Ahmadzadeh
  Abstract

  | https://doi.org/10.18177/sym.2025.65.sr.11691

  Baroque guitar composers and their extensive repertoire have largely been overlooked in classical guitar literature and education, with only a few notable figures receiving attention. This neglect primarily stems from a lack of resources and a limited understanding of the techniques required to transcribe baroque guitar music for the classical guitar. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on Robert de Visée, a prominent baroque guitar composer, specifically examining the Suite in D Minor from his Livre de Pièces pour la Guitare (1686). This suite, which Visée also transcribed for lute and theorbo in his Pièces de théorbe et de luth (1716), has been interpreted by various prominent classical guitarists. By conducting a comparative analysis of these transcriptions and Visée’s own methods, this study aims to uncover the challenges and complexities associated with transcribing French baroque repertoire. It seeks to provide insights into effective methodologies for preserving the authenticity and integrity of baroque compositions when adapting them for the modern classical guitar. Finally, a brief transcription is proposed as a practical example of how these challenges might be addressed.

• Music Matters: Curricular Change During Times of Institutional Stress
  Katherine Walker
  Abstract

  | https://doi.org/10.18177/sym.2025.65.sr.11690

  News headlines over the last few years confirm a grim reality for music in higher education: “Oxford Brookes University to Close Music Department”; “Jacksonville University Cuts Music and Theatre Programs and Lays off 40 Faculty Members”; “McNally Smith College of Music Closing Due to Lack of Funds.” In insecure times, institutions of higher learning tend to double down on programs and departments that are most attractive to prospective students. This prioritization drives a consumer model of education, in which departments compete for students, and students, in turn, shape the institutional priorities, rather than responding to, and benefiting from, the expertise reflected in them. For music departments, the situation is further complicated in the wake of COVID. Music manifests literally through the movement of air, and few things could be more catastrophic to the solvency of that practice than a deadly, global airborne pandemic. This paper outlines our 2022 music curriculum overhaul, which successfully balanced the urgent need to attract students with our mission of being producers of art, knowledge, civics, and democracy — all at a small, under-resourced liberal arts college facing an imminent demographic cliff, ballooning tuition costs, and the reverberations of COVID. We revived our department by (1) expanding interdisciplinary electives that link us to some of the largest departments on campus; (2) decolonizing our curriculum to remain in step with the values of our students; (3) leaning into technology-based musical opportunities and experiences for students with and without traditional music literacy; and (4) investing in pre-professional offerings in music therapy, music entrepreneurship, and music education, which provide concrete career prospects for our most devoted musicians. Today, our courses are among the highest-enrolling on campus, and we continue to teach a curriculum that reflects our values.