Concentrations:
Music | East Asian Studies
Music Awards:
2023 Hope Chatterton Prize
2020 Margery MacColl Award
Music Capstone Project:
“An Analysis of Anton Webern’s Op. 12”
My project aims to deconstruct Anton Webern’s Op. 12 “Vier Lieder,” with the aim to analyze the song cycle through a post-tonal and textual analysis. The goal of such analysis is to both better understand the song as an example of an atonal (but not yet twelve-tone) art song, but also to better approach performing this kind of music as a vocalist.
The second part of my project was a senior recital, which included vocal repertoire by Webern, Richard Strauss, and Samuel Barber. This recital built on two aspects of the Webern repertoire: its atonal nature and origins in the German art song tradition, or “Lieder.” The Strauss was an excellent example of lush, Romantic, poetry-centric German Lieder, which framed the Webern in the context of place. Meanwhile, the Barber was a sister piece that explored the same spirit of tonality-evasion, which better contextualizes the jarring aspect of the Webern.
Personal Statement:
Emma Giventer-Braff is a graduating senior concentrating in Music and East Asian Studies, focusing on academic music and Korean studies during her time at Brown. Emma intends to sing professionally, working as a classical soprano after her masters in voice. After graduation, she will first make her opera debut at Miami Music Festival, as Louis XV Bergère/La Chouette/Le Chauve-Souris in Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges in July. In August, Emma will move to Germany as part of the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange Program for Young Professionals, where she will study German language and voice, and also intern at an opera house. In her free time, Emma loves learning new languages, having dinner parties for her friends, and recording music for her Vietnamese cover band, among other things.