Residency Unlimited

Diana Policarpo is currently developing research in different locations of the city, working with local communities and archives, and consulting Johanna Magdalena Beyer’s manuscripts and musical scores which have a permanent home at the Music Division of New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

The piece she’s researching, Music of the Spheres/Status Quo (1938), is an unfinished political stage work, thought to be an opera and Beyer’s most ambitious project which she decided to apply to Guggenheim Fellowship in 1937.

Though  Music of the Spheres/Status Quo was never fully realized, and none of it was ever performed, it might have constituted, had it been supported, a Gesamtkunstwerk in a class with other pioneering works of musical theatre written written during the mid-twentieth century.

Her aim is to developed different pieces of work inspired in this unfinished project, that will culminate in a series of performances, sound works and events.

 

 

Photograph included with Beyer's 1935 U.S Passport application. Photographer Unknown; copy provisioned by United States Department of State, Passport Services, Department of Legal Affairs
“Music of the Spheres” (1938), title page, manuscript held in the Music Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

 

Photograph included with Beyer's 1935 U.S Passport application. Photographer Unknown; copy provisioned by United States Department of State, Passport Services, Department of Legal Affairs
Photograph included with Beyer’s 1935 U.S Passport application. Photographer Unknown; copy provisioned by United States Department of State, Passport Services, Department of Legal Affairs

 

Johanna M. Beyer, visual scores, 1933; manuscript held in the Music Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Johanna M. Beyer, visual scores, 1933; manuscript held in the Music Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

 

Johanna M. Beyer, visual scores, 1933; manuscript held in the Music Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Johanna M. Beyer, visual scores, 1933; manuscript held in the Music Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

 

Links:
http://www.newworldrecords.org/album.cgi?rm=view&album_id=17117
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_REVFN7A6_4
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/86gah6hf9780252039157.html

All images with courtesy of
© New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Music Division
Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center
40 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023-7498

Thank you: Residency Unlimited, Larry Polansky, Amy C. Beal, Interference Archive, NYPL