This text serves as the accompanying documentation to Generation X – The Opera, a contemporary spoken word adaptation of the novel by Canadian author Douglas Coupland. The fundamental direction of this research is the exploration of new directions in contemporary North American opera, melodrama, spoken word and musical theatre, through our shared linguistic, musical and cultural vernacular. This paper begins by establishing a theoretical foundation between language and music, and then moves toward the historical trajectory of the use of spoken word in a musical context. It proceeds to present an analysis of the cultural significance of Generation X, as both an age demographic and as a postmodern identity. The documentation concludes with an overview of the project, from its inception through to its premiere performance on March 17th, 2006.
See Full PDF See Full PDFGeorg Benda's Ariadne auf Naxos (1775) was an immediate success. By the end of the century, not only was it in the repertory of nearly every German theatre, but it was also one of the few German-language pieces translated for performances across Europe. Central to this melodrama--traditionally defined as an alternation of emotional declamation and pantomime with instrumental music--is its evocation of the sublime. Though scholars have posited Ariadne and its defining aesthetics as a model employed in subsequent Romantic opera, such teleological readings overlook reform melodramas that embraced vocal music and localised sublime moments. I argue that these works, rather than Ariadne, pushed melodrama's generic boundaries to the verge of opera and in the process provided instrumental music with the power to express the sublime without the aid of text. This exploration offers fresh insight into melodrama's music-text relations, generic hybridity, and aesthetic entanglements with opera and symphonic music.
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Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Arts
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In the spring of 1861, the twenty-five-year-old Eugene d’Ameli (known simply as Eugene) was a celebrity in New York and the leading female impersonator of his time in the US. Despite this, when the war began he did what many other performers were doing: he fled to Britain. He arrived in England completely unknown to the public, but within a year had established himself in the provinces and in London. After two years as a star attraction in London musical halls, he accepted a position with Christy’s Minstrels, in Liverpool, and for the next four years led that company’s productions of burlesques of Lucrezia Borgia, L’elisir d’amore, Fra Diavolo, and other popular operas. Through a close examination of the British press, this paper explores the place of opera in British popular culture of the 1860s and the role of the female impersonator in British minstrelsy. It shows that disparaging comments from newspaper critics did little to dampen the public’s appetite for Eugene and other female impersonators, either in London or Liverpool. The success of Christy’s company, generally, appears to have resulted from the company’s ability to tailor its productions to tastes of British audiences. While this study focuses on the opera burlesque, it also provides an opportunity to explore the place of cross-dressing in nineteenth-century theatre, and British attitudes on race, gender, and sexual orientation.
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Through original analysis of three contemporary, auteur-directed melodramas (Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and Todd Haynes’s Mildred Pierce), this book reconceives and renovates the terms in which melodrama has been understood. Returning to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s foundational, Enlightenment-era melodrama Pygmalion with its revival of an old story about sculpted objects that spring to life, Living Screens contends that this early production prefigures the structure of contemporary melodramas and serves as a model for the way we interact with media today. Melodrama is conceptualised as a ‘plastic’ form with the capacity to mould and be moulded and that speaks to fundamental processes of mediation. At the heart of melodrama, Living Screen argues, is our desire to see and be seen, hear and be heard, touch and be touched. Living Screens evokes the thrills, anxieties and uncertainties accompanying our attachment to technologies that are close-at-hand yet have far-reaching effects. In doing so, it explores the plasticity of our current situation, in which we live with screens that melodramatically touch our lives.
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"From January to November of 1993, I interviewed fourteen women composers from three Canadian urban centres-Montreal: Claire Piche, Lucie Jasmin, Pascale Trudel, Monique Jean, Helen Hall, and Kathy Kennedy; Toronto: Gayle Young, Sarah Peebles, Wende Bartley, Elma Miller, Ann Southam, and Carol Ann Weaver; and Vancouver: Hildegard Westerkamp and Susan Frykberg. These interviews then formed part of a larger study. This research explores gender issues in electroacoustic music, through its imagery and institutions, as well as through individual responses by my consultants. "
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Monodrama is a work for a sole protagonist, utilising both sung and spoken vocalism over a cathartic narrative. Developed as a subgenre of opera relatively recently, monodrama emerged in the era of Freudian psychology. Monodrama aims to convince the audience of the authority and infallibility of the protagonist’s point of view. An operatic monodrama rehearsal is a unique sociological dynamic, one that functions as a complex adaptive process with director, conductor and performer as principal agents. The effective functioning of this dynamic causes beneficial coherence, measurable by successful performance outcomes (Snowden, 2012). An interesting phenomenon is observed in monodrama rehearsals, divergent from traditionally hierarchical rehearsal dynamics found in opera. The singer has increased agency in rehearsal, effectively transforming the dynamic from a negotiation between stage director and conductor, as occurs in opera, into a collaboration of equal yet distinct roles. Director.
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In A Voice as Something More (ed., Feldman and Zeitlin; Chicago Press)
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Die Geisterinsel, a chamber opera based on Shakespeare’s Tempest, reworks an opera with the same title by Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg, a contemporary of Mozart. Ming Tsao transcribes Zumsteeg’s music in such a way that ‘noise’ infiltrates the original music that continually moves between the refined Classical style of Zumsteeg and the noises of the island where The Tempest is set. Tsao’s intention is to use noise to create a compact musical space in which irregular rhythmic forces twist and deform the Classical phrasing of progression so that a new kind of lyricism can surface.
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In this dissertation, Pieter Verstraete investigates how ‘auditory distress’ and its ramifications form a conceptual basis for analysing the listener’s various modes of relating to sound and music in contemporary music theatre. Among these modes, he discusses the modes of listening (attention), narrativisation and auditory imagination as meaningful ways to deal with auditory distress. Encouraged by his analysis of six contemporary music theatre performances in Belgium and the Netherlands, Verstraete proposes that auditory distress is to be understood not so much as an aesthetic strategy but as the departure point of all auditory perception. This distress is produced by an excess of intensities in listening, which can be heightened by the theatre’s context of visual deprivation. As such, the distress marks a crisis in the listener as subject, which questions the agency of the listener in relation to the ‘authoritative’ power of sound in calling her or him for a response. Unlike the dramatic traditions in theatre and opera, music theatre makes the listener aware of her or his position towards the distress, which is not alleviated by the overall channelling perspectives proposed by the performance. In order to grasp the workings and meanings of music theatre today, Verstraete proposes a concept-based investigation that rereads such concepts as acoustic community, sonorous envelope, acoustic mirror, acousmatic listening, schizophonic perspectives, vocal and musical personae, haptic space and spatialisation as results of the listener’s responses to auditory distress. In this way, Verstraete argues, music theatre ultimately engages in present-day cultures and politics of listening within the comprehensive though much contested space of aurality.
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PhD diss., Indiana University
This dissertation attempts to answer the question “Why has falsetto been systematically excluded from normative modes of western masculine vocality?” Or, in simpler terms: “Why doesn’t falsetto seem to ‘fit’ the male body?” More broadly, this project examines how the voice became an organ of identity, supposedly capable of revealing the furtive truth of a subject’s being through vocal sound. I explore these issues through a series of case studies. Chapter 1 examines how the discourses on singing, physiology, race, and gender all converged in late-Victorian England to produce our modern notion of vocal subjectivity. Both the sound of the voice and the structure of the vocal organs became sites where the boundaries of class, race, gender, and health were policed, and where the aesthetics of normative vocality were learned, embodied, and ultimately naturalized. Within this environment, male falsetto came to signify a wide range of “otherness,” including effeminacy, racial inferiority, and illness. Chapter 2 explores the intersection of national musical identity, gender identity, and historically informed performance practice through an examination of the early career and reception of countertenor Alfred Deller. Deller rose to prominence singing the music of England’s past with a falsetto-dominant singing technique. I trace the audile techniques that arose around Alfred Deller’s voice, which offered the listener strategies for attending to the claimed historicity of the countertenor voice while quelling—or at least quarantining—long ingrained anxieties regarding falsetto singing, thus maintaining the symbiotic relationship between “Englishness” and “Manliness.” On the opposite end of the spectrum, Chapter 3 discusses how the performance artist Klaus Nomi used falsetto to create a persona founded on disjunction and artificiality, and how his unique aesthetic sensibility emerged from gay male subculture, the East Village (New York) art scene, and New Wave pop. Finally, Chapter 4 explores the representation of countertenor bodies on the operatic stage in repertoire written specifically for the voice type since 1960, especially in the operas of Benjamin Britten, Philip Glass, and John Adams. This dissertation traces how the link between voice, body, and identity was forged, and how that negotiation plays out in the case of male falsetto. Ultimately, this project offers a critique of the way we currently think about our voices and ourselves.
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