Sabine Feisst, Associate Professor, Music

2008-10-07
Sabine Feisst is an associate professor of music history and literature in the ASU Herberger College School of Music. She presented her most recent research at an international musicological congress in Leipzig, Germany, Sept. 28 – Oct. 3, 2008, hosted by the German Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, the second largest musicological society in the world. The congress motto was Music – City. Traditions and Perspectives of Urban Music Cultures. Feisst discussed the music of the young, award-winning New York City-based composer Annie Gosfield, whose creative voice is shaped by urban environments and sounds. Feisst focused on three of Gosfield’s New York City “soundscapes”: The Manufacture of Tangled Ivory (1995), a work inspired by industrial revolution-era New York with roots in Los Angeles’ punk rock; Smoking and Drifting (2001), Gosfield’s “chronological emotional diary” after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; and Wild Pitch (2004), referring to a 2004 World Series baseball game between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox.

Feisst is the first musicologist to seriously examine Gosfield’s unique compositional approaches including taped street and industrial sounds reproduced on sampling keyboards, adaptations of urban sounds to traditional instruments and symbolic references to urbanity. Feisst first published an essay on Gosfield’s music in MusikTexte during November, 2007.

Sabine Feisst’s bio

Project Date: September 2008