Faculty Feats

Faculty Feats are a great resource for everyone to quickly discover what is happening with individual Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts faculty members.

Sabine Feisst, Associate Professor, Music

2007-06-18
Sabine Feisst, an assistant professor of music history and literature specializing in musical modernism and avant-garde music, has won a $40,000 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for 2007-2008 to complete research and write a book on Schoenberg in America. In collaboration with Severine Neff, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she edited Schoenberg’s choral setting of the Appalachian folksong My Horses Ain’t Hungry, which Schoenberg had left unfinished and was recently completed by Allen Anderson, for Belmont Music Publishers, Pacific Palisades.

She was invited to publish “Dika Newlin (1923-2006): A Remembrance” in the July 2006 issue of NewMusicBox and give an address in commemoration of Newlin at the Dika Newlin Life Celebration in Richmond, Virginia on September 16, 2006. Together with musicologist Elizabeth Keathley, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, she is currently working on a book on Newlin, composer, pianist, musicologist and rock performance artist who was one of Arnold Schoenberg’s youngest and most outstanding American students in the late 1930s and early 1940s. She also read a paper on Schoenberg and Romanticism at the International Conference: “Engaged Romanticism: Romanticism as Praxis” organized by the English Literature department at ASU and published articles on the American composers Morton Subotnick and Richard Teitelbaum in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Vol. 16, edited by Ludwig Finscher (Kassel: Bärenreiter/Stuttgart: Metzler, 2006).

Sabine Feisst’s bio

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