Conference Agenda

Josephine Baroni-Cavalcabò was a gifted singer and the center of a musical circle that included Franz Xaver Mozart, the youngest son of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Her own music collection came to Salzburg along with Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart's collection, which she donated to the Salzburg Dommusikverein und Mozarteum. Her salon was initially located in Lviv. When she moved to Vienna with her family in the late 1830s, a new salon began at their flat at Grünangergasse in Vienna. At both locations, she maintained interesting musical connections, first with the Schubert circle, and later with Robert and Clara Schumann. The paper aims at shedding light at Josephine Baroni-Cavalcabò’s network and at her agency in music.

Music research is the work of placing a magnifying glass on an overlooked part of music and history, greatly enlarging it. The efforts of all archivists and music librarians to organize, catalog, systemize and conveniently provide historical materials contribute significantly to research. So, the fact that research can begin with recorded and archived materials is an immense fortune for musicologists.

My research, which began in 2020 with a single photograph discovered in University of Michigan library, culminated in a paper published in 2022. This paper focused on a female pianist Kyung-shyn Song(1914-2010) active in modern Korea. Although her name had scarcely been mentioned after 1950, she was a Pyongyang-born pianist celebrated as a child prodigy and musical genius in the Korean music scene at the time. She was also appointed as a piano faculty at Michigan State University in 1947, making her the first Korean to hold such a position in the United States. By tracing her with newspapers, historical records and university-held materials, I located and contacted with her youngest daughter, and was able to verify several privately held photographs. Thus, I uncovered the biography and musical activities of this forgotten musician.

In 2024, Song’s family decided to preserve the original letters sent from Pyongyang to the United States almost 100 years ago. I had translated these letters and envelopes, hand-written in old Korean with Chinese and Japanese, into contemporary Korean. And they will be archived at the Nam Center for Korean Studies(NCKS), University of Michigan.

Collections from Silesian Cistercian monasteries, particularly Lubiąż, preserve
numerous opera arias, including castrato repertoire (30 arias!). This article examines their use in
the monastery – both liturgical and non-liturgical – explores methods of adaptation, and
considers possible performers. Adapting castrato arias for the monastery resulted not
only transforming the text into religious content, but also altering the performance
space, both acoustically and visually. In both opera and church, arias were intended to
move the audience emotionally.