Download or read book Black Opera written by Naomi Andre and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From classic films like Carmen Jones to contemporary works like The Diary of Sally Hemings and U-Carmen eKhayelitsa, American and South African artists and composers have used opera to reclaim black people's place in history. Naomi André draws on the experiences of performers and audiences to explore this music's resonance with today's listeners. Interacting with creators and performers, as well as with the works themselves, André reveals how black opera unearths suppressed truths. These truths provoke complex, if uncomfortable, reconsideration of racial, gender, sexual, and other oppressive ideologies. Opera, in turn, operates as a cultural and political force that employs an immense, transformative power to represent or even liberate. Viewing opera as a fertile site for critical inquiry, political activism, and social change, Black Opera lays the foundation for innovative new approaches to applied scholarship.
Download or read book Opera Cat written by Tess Weaver and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2002 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the opera diva Madame SoSo gets laryngitis, her singing cat Alma fills in for her.
Download or read book Opera 101 written by Fred Plotkin and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2013-07-16 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opera is the fastest growing of all the performing arts, attracting audiences of all ages who are enthralled by the gorgeous music, vivid drama, and magnificent production values. If you've decided that the time has finally come to learn about opera and discover for yourself what it is about opera that sends your normally reserved friends into states of ecstatic abandon, this is the book for you. Opera 101 is recognized as the standard text in English for anyone who wants to become an opera lover--a clear, friendly, and truly complete handbook to learning how to listen to opera, whether on the radio, on recordings, or live at the opera house. Fred Plotkin, an internationally respected writer and teacher about opera who for many years was performance manager of the Metropolitan Opera, introduces the reader (whatever his or her level of musical knowledge) to all the elements that make up opera, including: A brief, entertaining history of opera; An explanation of key operatic concepts, from vocal types to musical conventions; Hints on the best way to approach the first opera you attend and how to best understand what is happening both offstage and on; Lists of recommended books and recordings, and the most complete traveler's guide to opera houses around the world. The major part of Opera 101 is devoted to an almost minute-by-minute analysis of eleven key operas, ranging from Verdi's thunderous masterpiece Rigoletto and Puccini's electrifying Tosca through works by Mozart, Donizetti, Rossini, Offenbach, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner, to the psychological complexities of Richard Strauss's Elektra. Once you have completed Opera 101, you will be prepared to see and hear any opera you encounter, thanks to this book's unprecedentedly detailed and enjoyable method of revealing the riches of opera.
Download or read book Space Opera written by Catherynne M. Valente and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2019 HUGO AWARD FINALIST, BEST NOVEL The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy meets the joy and glamour of Eurovision in bestselling author Catherynne M. Valente's science fiction spectacle, where sentient races compete for glory in a galactic musical contest…and the stakes are as high as the fate of planet Earth. A century ago, the Sentience Wars tore the galaxy apart and nearly ended the entire concept of intelligent space-faring life. In the aftermath, a curious tradition was invented—something to cheer up everyone who was left and bring the shattered worlds together in the spirit of peace, unity, and understanding. Once every cycle, the great galactic civilizations gather for the Metagalactic Grand Prix—part gladiatorial contest, part beauty pageant, part concert extravaganza, and part continuation of the wars of the past. Species far and wide compete in feats of song, dance and/or whatever facsimile of these can be performed by various creatures who may or may not possess, in the traditional sense, feet, mouths, larynxes, or faces. And if a new species should wish to be counted among the high and the mighty, if a new planet has produced some savage group of animals, machines, or algae that claim to be, against all odds, sentient? Well, then they will have to compete. And if they fail? Sudden extermination for their entire species. This year, though, humankind has discovered the enormous universe. And while they expected to discover a grand drama of diplomacy, gunships, wormholes, and stoic councils of aliens, they have instead found glitter, lipstick, and electric guitars. Mankind will not get to fight for its destiny—they must sing. Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes have been chosen to represent their planet on the greatest stage in the galaxy. And the fate of Earth lies in their ability to rock.
Download or read book Bonfire Opera written by Danusha Laméris and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sometimes the most compelling landscapes are the ones where worlds collide: where a desert meets the sea, a civilization, no-man’s land. Here in Bonfire Opera, grief and Eros grapple in the same domain. A bullet-hole through the heart, a house full of ripe persimmons, a ghost in a garden. Coyotes cry out on the hill, and lovers find themselves kissing, “bee-stung, drunk” in the middle of road. Here, the dust is holy, as is the dark, unknown. These are poems that praise the impossible, wild world, finding beauty in its wake. Excerpt from “Bonfire Opera” In those days, there was a woman in our circle who was known, not only for her beauty, but also for taking off all her clothes and singing opera. And sure enough, as the night wore on and the stars emerged to stare at their reflections on the sea, and everyone had drunk a little wine, she began to disrobe, loose her great bosom and the tender belly, pale in the moonlight, the Viking hips, and to let her torn raiment fall to the sand as we looked up from the flames.
Download or read book Sand Opera written by Philip Metres and published by Alice James Books. This book was released on 2015-01-05 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using techniques of erasure, Metres seeks rhythm or language within the spare, bleak testimonies of those tortured at Abu Ghraib.
Download or read book Chinatown Opera Theater in North America written by Nancy Yunhwa Rao and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2017-01-11 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Awards: Irving Lowens Award, Society for American Music (SAM), 2019 Music in American Culture Award, American Musicological Society (AMS), 2018 Certificate of Merit for Best Historical Research in Recorded Country, Folk, Roots, or World Music, Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), 2018 Outstanding Achievement in Humanities and Cultural Studies: Media, Visual, and Performance Studies, Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS), 2019 The Chinatown opera house provided Chinese immigrants with an essential source of entertainment during the pre–World War II era. But its stories of loyalty, obligation, passion, and duty also attracted diverse patrons into Chinese American communities Drawing on a wealth of new Chinese- and English-language research, Nancy Yunhwa Rao tells the story of iconic theater companies and the networks and migrations that made Chinese opera a part of North American cultures. Rao unmasks a backstage world of performers, performance, and repertoire and sets readers in the spellbound audiences beyond the footlights. But she also braids a captivating and complex history from elements outside the opera house walls: the impact of government immigration policy; how a theater influenced a Chinatown's sense of cultural self; the dissemination of Chinese opera music via recording and print materials; and the role of Chinese American business in sustaining theatrical institutions. The result is a work that strips the veneer of exoticism from Chinese opera, placing it firmly within the bounds of American music and a profoundly American experience.
Download or read book The Limelight Book of Opera written by Arthur Jacobs and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 1985 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biographical sketches of the composers and critical interpretations of their productions accompany these summaries of eighty-seven famous operas
Download or read book Black Opera written by Mary Gentle and published by Gollancz. This book was released on 2013 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conrad Scalese is a writer of librettos for operas in a world where music has immense power. In the Church, the sung mass can bring about actual miracles like healing the sick. Opera is musicodrama, the highest form of music combined with human emotion, and the results of the passion it engenders can be nothing short of magical. In this world of miracles, Conrad is an atheist - he sees the same phenomena, but sees no need to attribute them to a Deity ... until his first really successful opera gets the opera-house struck by the lightning bolt of God's disapproval ... ... And Conrad comes to the attention of the Prince's Men, a powerful secret society, who are trying to use the magic of music to their own ends - in this case, an apocalyptic blood sacrifice. Life is about to get interesting for Conrad.
Download or read book Opera Or The Undoing of Women written by Catherine Clement and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This was the first work to have applied a systematised feminist theory to opera. It concentrates on the stories & text of opera, that perhaps have more relevence today in a growing literature than it had when it was the "sacrilegious" pioneering work.
Download or read book The Opera Fanatic written by Claudio E. Benzecry and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-07-15 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though some dismiss opera as old-fashioned, it shows no sign of disappearing from the world's stage. So why do audiences continue to flock to it? Opera lovers are an intense lot, Benzecry discovers in his look at the fanatics who haunt the legendary Colón Opera House in Buenos Aires.
Download or read book Opera and the City written by Andrea Goldman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-10 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In late imperial China, opera transmitted ideas across the social hierarchy about the self, family, society, and politics. Beijing attracted a diverse array of opera genres and audiences and, by extension, served as a hub for the diffusion of cultural values. It is in this context that historian Andrea S. Goldman harnesses opera as a lens through which to examine urban cultural history. Her meticulous yet playful account takes up the multiplicity of opera types that proliferated at the time, exploring them as contested sites through which the Qing court and commercial playhouses negotiated influence and control over the social and moral order. Opera performance blurred lines between public and private life, and offered a stage on which to act out gender and class transgressions. This work illuminates how the state and various urban constituencies manipulated opera to their own ends, and sheds light on empire-wide transformations underway at the time.
Download or read book Blackness in Opera written by Naomi Andre and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blackness in Opera critically examines the intersections of race and music in the multifaceted genre of opera. A diverse cross-section of scholars places well-known operas (Porgy and Bess, Aida, Treemonisha) alongside lesser-known works such as Frederick Delius's Koanga, William Grant Still's Blue Steel, and Clarence Cameron White's Ouanga! to reveal a new historical context for re-imagining race and blackness in opera. The volume brings a wide-ranging, theoretically informed, interdisciplinary approach to questions about how blackness has been represented in these operas, issues surrounding characterization of blacks, interpretation of racialized roles by blacks and whites, controversies over race in the theatre and the use of blackface, and extensions of blackness along the spectrum from grand opera to musical theatre and film. In addition to essays by scholars, the book also features reflections by renowned American tenor George Shirley. Contributors are Naomi André, Melinda Boyd, Gwynne Kuhner Brown, Karen M. Bryan, Melissa J. de Graaf, Christopher R. Gauthier, Jennifer McFarlane-Harris, Gayle Murchison, Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., Eric Saylor, Sarah Schmalenberger, Ann Sears, George Shirley, and Jonathan O. Wipplinger.
Download or read book Opera from the Greek written by Michael Ewans and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Ewans explores how classical Greek tragedy and epic poetry have been appropriated in opera, through eight selected case studies. He examines the issues through a comparative analysis of significant divergences of plot, character and dramatic strategy between source text, libretto and opera.
Download or read book Operatic Geographies written by Suzanne Aspden and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-04-22 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its origin, opera has been identified with the performance and negotiation of power. Once theaters specifically for opera were established, that connection was expressed in the design and situation of the buildings themselves, as much as through the content of operatic works. Yet the importance of the opera house’s physical situation, and the ways in which opera and the opera house have shaped each other, have seldom been treated as topics worthy of examination. Operatic Geographies invites us to reconsider the opera house’s spatial production. Looking at opera through the lens of cultural geography, this anthology rethinks the opera house’s landscape, not as a static backdrop, but as an expression of territoriality. The essays in this anthology consider moments across the history of the genre, and across a range of geographical contexts—from the urban to the suburban to the rural, and from the “Old” world to the “New.” One of the book’s most novel approaches is to consider interactions between opera and its environments—that is, both in the domain of the traditional opera house and in less visible, more peripheral spaces, from girls’ schools in late seventeenth-century England, to the temporary arrangements of touring operatic troupes in nineteenth-century Calcutta, to rural, open-air theaters in early twentieth-century France. The essays throughout Operatic Geographies powerfully illustrate how opera’s spatial production informs the historical development of its social, cultural, and political functions.
Download or read book Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater written by Nina Penner and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater is the first systematic exploration of how sung forms of drama tell stories. Through examples from opera's origins to contemporary musicals, Nina Penner examines the roles of character-narrators and how they differ from those in literary and cinematic works, how music can orient spectators to characters' points of view, how being privy to characters' inner thoughts and feelings may evoke feelings of sympathy or empathy, and how performers' choices affect not only who is telling the story but what story is being told. Unique about Penner's approach is her engagement with current work in analytic philosophy. Her study reveals not only the resources this philosophical tradition can bring to musicology but those which musicology can bring to philosophy, challenging and refining accounts of narrative, point of view, and the work-performance relationship within both disciplines. She also considers practical problems singers and directors confront on a daily basis, such as what to do about Wagner's Jewish caricatures and the racism of Orientalist operas. More generally, Penner reflects on how centuries-old works remain meaningful to contemporary audiences and have the power to attract new, more diverse audiences to opera and musical theater. By exploring how practitioners past and present have addressed these issues, Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater offers suggestions for how opera and musical theater can continue to entertain and enrich the lives of 21st-century audiences.
Download or read book Complete Opera Book written by George Henry Hubert Lascelles Harewood, Earl of and published by London : Putnam. This book was released on 1956 with total page 1262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
