Download or read book Contemporary Opera in Flux written by Yayoi U Everett and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In twelve essays, Contemporary Opera in Flux discusses a series of shifts that, taken together, have radically redefined the production and reception of opera. Focusing on productions involving late twentieth- and twenty-first century scores and libretti, the contributors draw on conversations with members of creative teams and studies of archival material, dipping into a historical record that remains in flux as composers, librettists, directors, and designers revisit existing work and create anew. The contributors to this volume push the boundaries of contemporary opera scholarship by examining works that disrupt operatic conventions; tackle sociopolitical issues such as drug trafficking, racial injustice, and cultural trauma; and advance underrepresented works by female, African-American, Asian, and avant-garde composers around the globe. Contemporary Opera in Flux bridges the gaps between expanding literature on opera, theater, new music, postmodern dramaturgy, and posthuman aesthetics, while also confronting larger questions of identity, representation, and narrative agency that are at the forefront of contemporary music scholarship. This collection of essays engages critically with the past out of a conviction that, amid general public perceptions of opera as anachronistic or elitist, contemporary opera has emerged as an artistic incubator for experimentation.
Download or read book New Dramaturgies of Contemporary Opera written by Jingyi Zhang and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-09-16 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Dramaturgies of Contemporary Opera is the first and only book that approaches the dramaturgy of contemporary opera from the unique perspectives of living practitioners (composers, librettists, directors, producers, singers, dramaturgs, and administrators) who provide valuable first-hand insight into the coming into being of an opera today. The edited collection captures the ethos of contemporary opera-making in the global context and serves as a timely intervention in addressing the array of heterogenous dramaturgical practices that go into making an opera today in an era of flux. The collection is split into four parts: Part I presents the new dramaturgical considerations that the field is currently exploring; Part II investigates the ways in which non-Western cultures and perspectives can and have been represented; Part III explores the roles of space, nature, and environment in contemporary opera; and finally, Part IV looks at the ways in which technology has intersected with the creation of contemporary opera. With perspectives from practitioners throughout, this collection is essential reading for advanced students, researchers, and scholars of contemporary opera, as well as practicing dramaturgs in this field.
Download or read book Loris Gr aud written by Thomas Roussel and published by Jrp Ringier. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Cellar Door" is a spectacle stretching in time and space. As an exhibition, it is the most ambitious project of French artist Loris Gréaud so far, starting at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and continuing at the ICA London, conceived as musical in progress. As a book, it includes the project's synopsis and musical scores, thus serving as the libretto of this opera of a new genre.
Download or read book Singing Out written by Heather MacLachlan and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can you change the world through song? This appealing idea has long been the professed aim of singers who are part of choruses affiliated with the Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses (GALA). Theses choruses first emerged in the 1970s, and grew out of a very American tradition of (often gender-segregated) choral singing that explicitly presents itself as a community-based activity. By taking a close look at these choruses and their mission, Heather MacLachlan unpacks the fascinating historical and cultural dynamics behind groups that seek to change society for the better by encouraging acceptance of LGBT-identified people and promoting diversity more generally. She characterizes their mission as “integrationist rather than liberationist” and zeroes in on the inherent tension between GALA’s progressive social goals and the fact that the music most often performed by GALA groups is deeply rooted in a fairly narrowly conceived tradition of art music that identifies as white, Euro-centric, and middle class--and that much of the membership identifies as white and middle class as well. Pundits often wax eloquent about the power of music, asserting that it can, in some positive way, change the world. Such statements often rest on an unexamined claim that music can and does foster social justice. Singing Out: GALA Choruses and Social Change tackles the premise underlying such claims, analyzing groups of amateur singers who are explicitly committed to an agenda of social justice.
Download or read book Seeing Opera Anew written by Joseph Cone and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-19 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What people ultimately want from opera, audience research suggests, is to be absorbed in a story that engages their feelings, even moves them deeply, and that may lead them to insights about life and, perhaps, themselves. How and why can this combination of music and drama do that? What causes people to be moved by opera? How is it that people may become more informed about living and their own lives? Seeing Opera Anew addresses these fundamental questions. Most approaches to opera present information solely from the humanities, providing musical, literary, and historical interpretations, but this book offers a “stereo” perspective, adding insights from the sciences closely related to human life, including evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience. It can be hoped that academic specialists less familiar with the science will find points of interest in this book’s novel approach, and that open-minded students and inquisitive opera-goers will be stimulated by its “cultural and biological perspective.”
Download or read book A New Philosophy of Opera written by Yuval Sharon and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2024-09-03 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From “the most imaginative director in the US” (New York Times) comes this generational work with a vision for transforming opera into a powerhouse cultural phenomenon. "This book builds a compelling roadmap for the future of opera, and how it can truly be accessible for everyone." —Gustavo Dudamel Known as opera’s “disrupter-in-residence,” director Yuval Sharon has never adhered to the art form’s conventions. In his many productions in both the United States and Europe, he constantly challenges the perception of opera as aloof by urging, among other things: performing operas in “non-places,” such as parking lots; encouraging the use of amplification; and shuffling the traditional structure of classic works, like performing Puccini’s La bohème in reverse order, ending not with the tubercular heroine Mimi’s death but with her first falling in love. With A New Philosophy of Opera, Sharon has crafted a radical and refreshing book that can act as an introduction to the art form for the culturally curious, or as a manifesto for his fellow artists. In an engaging style that ranges from the provocative to the personal, Sharon offers a 360-degree view of the art form, from the audience experience to the artist’s process; from its socially conscious potential to its economic reality; and from its practical to its emotional and spiritual dimensions. Surveying the role of opera in the United States and drawing on his experiences from Berlin to Los Angeles, Sharon lays out his vision for an “anti-elite opera” that celebrates the imagination and challenges the status quo. With an illustrated and unconventional history of the art form (not following a straight line but tracing a fantastical “time-curve”) weaving throughout the book, Sharon resists the notion of the opera as “dying” and instead portrays it as a glorious chaos constantly being reborn and reshaped. With its advocacy of opera as an “enchanted space” and its revolutionary message, A New Philosophy of Opera is itself a work of art—a living book with profound philosophical implications—that will stand the test of time.
Download or read book Opera Theatrical Culture and Society in Late Eighteenth Century Naples written by Anthony R. DelDonna and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The operatic culture of late eighteenth-century Naples represents the fullest expression of a matrix of creators, practitioners, theorists, patrons, and entrepreneurs linking aristocratic, public and religious spheres of contemporary society. The considerable resonance of 'Neapolitan' opera in Europe was verified early in the eighteenth century not only through voluminous reports offered by locals and visitors in gazettes, newspapers, correspondence or diaries, but also, and more importantly, through the rich and tangible artistic patrimony produced for local audiences and then exported to the Italian peninsula and abroad. Naples was not simply a city of entertainment, but rather a cultural epicenter and paradigm producing highly innovative and successful genres of stage drama reflecting every facet of contemporary society. Anthony R. DelDonna provides a rich study of operatic culture from 1775-1800. The book demonstrates how contemporary stage traditions, stimulated by the Enlightenment, engaged with and responded to the changing social, political, and artistic contexts of the late eighteenth century in Naples. It focuses on select yet representative compositions from different genres of opera that illuminate the diverse contemporary cultural forces shaping these works and underlining the continued innovation and European recognition of operatic culture in Naples. It also defines how the cultural milieu of Naples - aristocratic and sacred, private and public - exercises a profound yet idiosyncratic influence on the repertory studied, the creation of which could not have occurred elsewhere on the Continent.
Download or read book New Grove Book of Operas written by Stanley Sadie and published by . This book was released on with total page 766 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world's defiinitive single volume of opera reference including: full plot synopses, cast lists, singers, composers, literary and social history, recordings, and much more. Covers over 250 operas performed over the last quarter-century, additional works selected for interest, merit, or historical significance, 64 pages of color plates, 100 black-and-white photographs, fully cross-referenced with indexes and a glossary.
Download or read book Perspectives Creating and Producing Contemporary Opera and Musical Theater written by and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon written by Cormac Newark and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-18 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera has always been a vital and complex mixture of commercial and aesthetic concerns, of bourgeois politics and elite privilege. In its long heyday in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it came to occupy a special place not only among the arts but in urban planning, too this is, perhaps surprisingly, often still the case. The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon examines how opera has become the concrete edifice it was never meant to be, by tracing its evolution from a market entirely driven by novelty to one of the most canonic art forms still in existence. Throughout the book, a lively assembly of musicologists, historians, and industry professionals tackle key questions of opera's past, present, and future. Why did its canon evolve so differently from that of concert music? Why do its top ten titles, all more than a century old, now account for nearly a quarter of all performances worldwide? Why is this system of production becoming still more top-heavy, even while the repertory seemingly expands, notably to include early music? Topics range from the seventeenth century to the present day, from Russia to England and continental Europe to the Americas. To reflect the contested nature of many of them, each is addressed in paired chapters. These complement each other in different ways: by treating the same geographical location in different periods, by providing different national or regional perspectives on the same period, or by thinking through similar conceptual issues in contrasting or changing contexts. Posing its questions in fresh, provocative terms, The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon challenges scholarly assumptions in music and cultural history, and reinvigorates the dialogue with an industry that is, despite everything, still growing.
Download or read book The Operatic Archive written by Colleen Renihan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-04-03 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Operatic Archive: American Opera as History extends the growing interdisciplinary conversation in opera studies by drawing on new research in performance studies and the philosophy of history. Moving beyond traditional aesthetic conceptions of opera, this book argues for opera’s powerful potential for historical impact and engagement in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century works by American composers. Considering opera’s ability to serve as a vehicle for memory, historical experience, affect, presence, and the historical sublime, this volume demonstrates how opera’s ability to represent and evoke historical events and historical experience differs fundamentally from the representations and recreations of other modes (specifically, literary and dramatic representations). Building on the work of performance scholars such as Joseph Roach, Rebecca Schneider, and Diana Taylor, and in consultation with recent debates in the philosophy of history, the book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and researchers, particularly those working in the areas of opera studies and performance studies.
Download or read book Curating Opera written by Stephen Mould and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Curation as a concept and a catchword in modern parlance has, over recent decades, become deeply ingrained in modern culture. The purpose of this study is to explore the curatorial forces at work within the modern opera house and to examine the functionaries and processes that guide them. In turn, comparisons are made with the workings of the traditional art museum, where artworks are studied, preserved, restored, displayed and contextualised – processes which are also present in the opera house. Curatorial roles in each institution are identified and described, and the role of the celebrity art curator is compared with that of the modern stage director, who has acquired previously undreamt-of licence to interrogate operatic works, overlaying them with new concepts and levels of meaning in order to reinvent and redefine the operatic repertoire for contemporary needs. A point of coalescence between the opera house and the art museum is identified, with the transformation, towards the end of the nineteenth century, of the opera house into the operatic museum. Curatorial practices in the opera house are examined, and further communalities and synergies in the way that ‘works’ are defined in each institution are explored. This study also considers the so-called ‘birth’ of opera around the start of the seventeenth century, with reference to the near-contemporary rise of the modern art museum, outlining operatic practice and performance history over the last 400 years in order to identify the curatorial practices that have historically been employed in the maintenance and development of the repertoire. This examination of the forces of curation within the modern opera house will highlight aspects of authenticity, authorial intent, preservation, restoration and historically informed performance practice.
Download or read book The Female Voice in the Twentieth Century written by Serena Facci and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-01 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By integrating theoretical approaches to the female voice with the musicological investigation of female singers’ practices, the contributors to this volume offer fresh viewpoints on the material, symbolic and cultural aspects of the female voice in the twentieth century. Various styles and genres are covered, including Western art music, experimental composition, popular music, urban folk and jazz. The volume offers a substantial and innovative appraisal of the role of the female voice from the perspective of twentieth-century performance practices, the centrality of female singers’ experimentations and extended vocal techniques along with the process of the ‘subjectivisation’ of the voice.
Download or read book Modern Music and After written by Paul Griffiths and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-16 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over three decades, Paul Griffiths's survey has remained the definitive study of music since the Second World War; this fully revised and updated edition re-establishes Modern Music and After as the preeminent introduction to the music of our time. The disruptions of the war, and the struggles of the ensuing peace, were reflected in the music of the time: in Pierre Boulez's radical reformation of compositional technique and in John Cage's development of zen music; in Milton Babbitt's settling of the serial system and in Dmitry Shostakovich's unsettling symphonies; in Karlheinz Stockhausen's development of electronic music and in Luigi Nono's pursuit of the universally human, in Iannis Xenakis's view of music as sounding mathematics and in Luciano Berio's consideration of it as language. The initiatives of these composers and their contemporaries opened prospects that haven't yet stopped unfolding. This constant expansion of musical thinking since 1945 has left us with no singular history of music; Griffiths's study accordingly follows several different paths, showing how and why they converge and diverge. This new edition of Modern Music and After discusses not only the music of the fifteen years that have passed since the previous edition, but also the recent explosion of scholarly interest in the latter half of the twentieth century. In particular, the book has been expanded to incorporate the variety of responses to the modernist impasse experienced by composers of the 1980s and 1990s. Griffiths then moves the book into the twenty-first century as he examines such highly influential composers as Helmut Lachenmann and Salvatore Sciarrino. For its breadth, wealth of detail, and characteristic wit and clarity, the third edition of Modern Music and After is required reading for the student and the enquiring listener.
Download or read book The Off Modern written by Svetlana Boym and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Svetlana Boym writes a new genealogy of modernity, moving beyond older debates between modernism and postmodernism to focus on the intersection of art, architecture, technology, and philosophy in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on theories of Georg Simmel, Henri Bergson, Aby Warburg, and Jacques Derrida, Boym presents the off-modern as an eccentric, self-questioning, anti-authoritarian perspective with roots in the Russian avant-garde, now developed in surprising ways by contemporary artists, architects, and curators around the world. She illustrates the off-modern in discussions of (and with) figures as diverse as architect Rem Koolhaas, Albanian artist-turned-mayor Edi Rama, an art collective in Delhi, and the creator of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. Both a manifesto and a memoir, The Off-Modern often returns to themes of travel and immigration, exploring issues of diasporic intimacy and productive estrangement amid nostalgic landscapes of urban ruins.
Download or read book The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music written by Björn Heile and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-29 with total page 669 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernism in music still arouses passions and is riven by controversies. Taking root in the early decades of the twentieth century, it achieved ideological dominance for almost three decades following the Second World War, before becoming the object of widespread critique in the last two decades of the century, both from critics and composers of a postmodern persuasion and from prominent scholars associated with the ‘new musicology’. Yet these critiques have failed to dampen its ongoing resilience. The picture of modernism has considerably broadened and diversified, and has remained a pivotal focus of debate well into the twenty-first century. This Research Companion does not seek to limit what musical modernism might be. At the same time, it resists any dilution of the term that would see its indiscriminate application to practically any and all music of a certain period. In addition to addressing issues already well established in modernist studies such as aesthetics, history, institutions, place, diaspora, cosmopolitanism, production and performance, communication technologies and the interface with postmodernism, this volume also explores topics that are less established; among them: modernism and affect, modernism and comedy, modernism versus the ‘contemporary’, and the crucial distinction between modernism in popular culture and a ‘popular modernism’, a modernism of the people. In doing so, this text seeks to define modernism in music by probing its margins as much as by restating its supposed essence.
