Download or read book Mime Music and Drama on the Eighteenth Century Stage written by Edward Nye and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-21 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 'ballet d'action' was one of the most successful and controversial forms of theatre in the early modern period. A curious hybrid of dance, mime and music, its overall and overriding intention was to create drama. It was danced drama rather than dramatic dance, musical drama rather than dramatic music. Most modern critical studies of the ballet d'action treat it more narrowly as stage dance and very few view it as part of the history of mime. Little use has previously been made of the most revealing musical evidence. This innovative book does justice to the distinctive hybrid nature of the ballet d'action by taking a comparative approach, using contemporary literature and literary criticism, music, mime and dance from a wide range of English and European sources. Edward Nye presents a fascinating study of this important and influential part of eighteenth-century European theatre.
Download or read book Animation Plasticity and Music in Italy 1770 1830 written by Ellen Lockhart and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This path-breaking study of stage works in Italian musical performances reconsiders a crucial period of music history. Through an interdisciplinary examination of the statue animated by music, Ellen Lockhart deftly shows how Enlightenment ideas influenced Italian theater and music, and vice versa. As Lockhart reveals, the animated statue became a fundamental figure within aesthetic theory and musical practice during the years spanning 1770–1830. Taking as its point of departure a repertoire of Italian ballets, melodramas, and operas from this period, Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy traces its core ideas between science, philosophy, theories of language, itinerant performance traditions, the epistemology of sensing, and music criticism.
Download or read book A Day in a Working Life 3 volumes written by Gary Westfahl and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 2543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ideal for high school and college students studying history through the everyday lives of men and women, this book offers intriguing information about the jobs that people have held, from ancient times to the 21st century. This unique book provides detailed studies of more than 300 occupations as they were practiced in 21 historical time periods, ranging from prehistory to the present day. Each profession is examined in a compelling essay that is specifically written to inform readers about career choices in different times and cultures, and is accompanied by a bibliography of additional sources of information, sidebars that relate historical issues to present-day concerns, as well as related historical documents. Readers of this work will learn what each profession entailed or entails on a daily basis, how one gained entry to the vocation, training methods, and typical compensation levels for the job. The book provides sufficient specific detail to convey a comprehensive understanding of the experiences, benefits, and downsides of a given profession. Selected accompanying documents further bring history to life by offering honest testimonies from people who actually worked in these occupations or interacted with those in that field.
Download or read book Acoustemologies in Contact written by Emily Wilbourne and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating collection of essays, an international group of scholars explores the sonic consequences of transcultural contact in the early modern period. They examine how cultural configurations of sound impacted communication, comprehension, and the categorisation of people. Addressing questions of identity, difference, sound, and subjectivity in global early modernity, these authors share the conviction that the body itself is the most intimate of contact zones, and that the culturally contingent systems by which sounds made sense could be foreign to early modern listeners and to present day scholars. Drawing on a global range of archival evidence—from New France and New Spain, to the slave ships of the Middle Passage, to China, Europe, and the Mediterranean court environment—this collection challenges the privileged position of European acoustical practices within the discipline of global-historical musicology. The discussion of Black and non-European experiences demonstrates how the production of ‘the canon’ in the cosmopolitan centres of colonial empires was underpinned by processes of human exploitation and extraction of resources. As such, this text is a timely response to calls within the discipline to decolonise music history and to contextualise the canonical works of the European past. This volume is accessible to a wide and interdisciplinary audience, not only within musicology, but also to those interested in early modern global history, sound studies, race, and slavery.
Download or read book Gendered Touch written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-06-13 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of science, the history of women, and gender history – Gendered Touch offers new perspectives on the intersections between the textual and the embodied nature of scientific knowledge in early modern Europe.
Download or read book Conversational Enlightenment written by David Randall and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-30 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the spread of the concept of conversation during the Enlightenment, including the project of politeness, the fine arts, philosophy and public opinion. The book narrates this triumph of conversational style and thought partly as a succession to the oratorical rhetoric that characterized the Renaissance and partly as the victory of the only mode of speech that recognized women as women, and not as imitation men. It also rewrites Jürgen Habermas' history of the public sphere as the history of rational conversation.
Download or read book A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Baroque and Enlightenment Age written by and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-08-20 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the period of the Baroque and Enlightenment the word “emotion”, denoting passions and feelings, came into usage, albeit in an irregular fashion. “Emotion” ultimately emerged as a term in its own right, and evolved in English from meaning physical agitation to describe mental feeling. However, the older terminology of “passions” and “affections” continued as the dominant discourse structuring thinking about feeling and its wider religious, political, social, economic, and moral imperatives. The emotional cultures described in these essays enable some comparative discussion about the history of emotions, and particularly the causes and consequences of emotional change in the larger cultural contexts of the Baroque and Enlightenment. Emotions research has enabled a rethinking of dominant narratives of the period-of histories of revolution, state-building, the rise of the public sphere, religious and scientific transformation, and more. As a new and dynamic field, the essays here are just the beginning of a much bigger history of emotions.
Download or read book Expanded Choreographies Choreographic Histories written by Anna Leon and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2022-07-31 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From objects to sounds, choreography is expanding beyond dance and human bodies in motion. This book offers one of the rare systematic investigations of expanded choreography as it develops in contemporaneity, and is the first to consider expanded choreography from a trans-historical perspective. Through case studies on different periods of European dance history - ranging from Renaissance dance to William Forsythe's choreographic objects and from Baroque court ballets to digital choreographies - it traces a journey of choreography as a practice transcending its sole association with dancing, moving, human bodies.
Download or read book Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France written by Olivia Bloechl and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-03-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its origins in the 1670s through the French Revolution, serious opera in France was associated with the power of the absolute monarchy, and its ties to the crown remain at the heart of our understanding of this opera tradition (especially its foremost genre, the tragédie en musique). In Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France, however, Olivia Bloechl reveals another layer of French opera’s political theater. The make-believe worlds on stage, she shows, involved not just fantasies of sovereign rule but also aspects of government. Plot conflicts over public conduct, morality, security, and law thus appear side-by-side with tableaus hailing glorious majesty. What’s more, opera’s creators dispersed sovereign-like dignity and powers well beyond the genre’s larger-than-life rulers and gods, to its lovers, magicians, and artists. This speaks to the genre’s distinctive combination of a theological political vocabulary with a concern for mundane human capacities, which is explored here for the first time. By looking at the political relations among opera characters and choruses in recurring scenes of mourning, confession, punishment, and pardoning, we can glimpse a collective political experience underlying, and sometimes working against, ancienrégime absolutism. Through this lens, French opera of the period emerges as a deeply conservative, yet also more politically nuanced, genre than previously thought.
Download or read book Kinaesthesia and Classical Antiquity 1750 1820 written by Helen Slaney and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that touch and movement played a significant role, long overlooked, in generating perceptions of ancient material culture in the late 18th century. At this time the reception of classical antiquity had been transformed. Interactions with material culture – ruins, sculpture, and artefacts – formed the core of this transformation. Some such interactions were proto-archaeological, such as the Dilettanti expeditions to Athens and Asa Minor; others were touristic, seen in the guidebooks consulted by travellers to Rome and the diaries they composed; and others creative, resulting in novels, poetry, and dance performances. Some involved the reproduction of experience in a gallery or museum setting. What all encounters with ancient material culture had in common, however, is their haptic sensory basis. The sense typically associated with the Enlightenment is vision, but this has obscured the equally important contribution made by touch and movement to the way in which a newly materialised Graeco-Roman world was perceived. Kinaesthesia, or the sense of self-movement, is rarely recognised in its own right, but because all encounters with sites and objects are embodied, and all embodiment takes place in motion, this sense is vital to forming more abstract or imaginative impressions. Theories of embodied cognition propose that all intellectual processes are also physical. This book shows how ideas about classical antiquity in the volatile milieu of the late 18th century developed as a result of diverse kinaesthetic relationships.
Download or read book Gr try s Operas and the French Public written by R.J. Arnold and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why, in the dying days of the Napoleonic Empire, did half of Paris turn out for the funeral of a composer? The death of André Ernest Modeste Grétry in 1813 was one of the sensations of the age, setting off months of tear-stained commemorations, reminiscences and revivals of his work. To understand this singular event, this interdisciplinary study looks back to Grétry’s earliest encounters with the French public during the 1760s and 1770s, seeking the roots of his reputation in the reactions of his listeners. The result is not simply an exploration of the relationship between a musician and his audiences, but of developments in musical thought and discursive culture, and of the formation of public opinion over a period of intense social and political change. The core of Grétry’s appeal was his mastery of song. Distinctive, direct and memorable, his melodies were exported out of the opera house into every corner of French life, serving as folkloristic tokens of celebration and solidarity, longing and regret. Grétry’s attention to the subjectivity of his audiences had a profound effect on operatic culture, forging a new sense of democratic collaboration between composer and listener. This study provides a reassessment of Grétry’s work and musical thought, positioning him as a major figure who linked the culture of feeling and the culture of reason - and who paved the way for Romantic notions of spectatorial absorption and the power of music.
Download or read book Music Pantomime and Freedom in Enlightenment France written by Hedy Law and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2020 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did composers and performers use the lost art of pantomime to explore and promote the Enlightenment ideals of free expression?
Download or read book Goldoni in Paris written by Jessica Goodman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-17 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thirty years Carlo Goldoni spent in Paris hold an ambiguous place in his career. The preface to his autobiography explicitly draws attention to France as the site of his authorial glory, but elsewhere he dismisses his work for the Parisian Comédie-Italienne as a failure, and this view has come to dominate modern readings of his French experience. This study sets out to explore this apparent contradiction. By reading Goldoni's own contemporary and subsequent accounts through the lens of his context as a dramatic author in 1760s Paris, Jessica Goodman sheds new light on both his experience and critical reactions to that experience. A key part of this contextualisation is an examination of contemporary Comédie-Italienne archives, resulting in the most comprehensive existing account of this oft-neglected theatre and its authorial relations in the period. When material and artistic conditions at the Comédie-Italienne thwarted the self-fashioning strategies Goldoni had developed in Italy, he turned his attention to other areas of French life; notably the court and the Comédie-Française. Yet despite relative success in this regard, his career as an eclectic homme de lettres was lost in translation to posterity. In his French Mémoires, he constructed the claim of Parisian glory according to an out-dated understanding of what it meant to succeed in the French literary field, focusing predominantly on the power of Comédie-Française success. Ultimately, this construction was a failure: in modern France, Goldoni is remembered as a famous foreigner, not the consecrated French littérateur he believed he had become.
Download or read book Dancing Shakespeare written by Iris Julia Bührle and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-11-29 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dancing Shakespeare is the first history of ballets based on William Shakespeare’s works from the birth of the dramatic story ballet in the eighteenth century to the present. It focuses on two main questions: "How can Shakespeare be danced?" and "How can dance shed new light on Shakespeare?" The book explores how librettists and choreographers have transposed Shakespeare’s complex storylines, multifaceted protagonists, rhetoric and humour into non-verbal means of expression, often going beyond the texts in order to comment on them or use them as raw material for their own creative purposes. One aim of the monograph is to demonstrate that the study of wordless performances allows us to gain a deeper understanding of Shakespeare’s texts. It argues that ballets based on Shakespeare’s works direct the audience’s attention to the "bare bones" of the plays: their situations, their characters, and the evolution of both. Moreover, they reveal and develop the "choreographies" that are written into the texts and highlight the importance of movements and gestures as signifiers in Shakespeare’s plays. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of literature, dance, and music, as well as to an international readership of lovers of Shakespeare, ballet, and the arts.
Download or read book Ballet Music from the Mannheim Court Part 5 written by Christian Cannabich and published by A-R Editions, Inc.. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume completes the collection Ballet Music from the Mannheim Court with two ballets by Christian Cannabich: Les Fêtes du sérail (probably based on Jean-Georges Noverres Les Jalousies, ou Les Fêtes du sérail, as described in his Lettres sur la danse, 1760) and Angélique et Médor, ou Roland furieux (based on the characters in Ludovico Ariostos Orlando furioso). The former ballet features several movements with Turkish instruments and the exotic setting of a harem. The latter features detailed annotations in the music regarding the story, which differs in some respects from the scenario for this ballet by Étienne Lauchery that was published for an earlier performance in Kassel.
Download or read book Performing Epic or Telling Tales written by Fiona Macintosh and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performing Epic or Telling Tales takes the new millennium as a starting point for an exploration of the turn to narrative in twenty-first-century theatre, which is often also a turn to Graeco-Roman epic. However, the dominant focus of the volume is less on 'what' the recent epic turn in the theatre consists of than 'why' it seems to be so prevalent: this turn is explained with reference not only to the translation and scholarly histories of the epics, but also to earlier performance traditions and, notably, to recent theoretical debates relating to text-based 'drama' and performance based 'theatre'. What is perhaps most remarkable about this epic turn is not simply the sheer number of outstanding performances that it has produced; it is also that recent practice appears to have outstripped much theoretical discussion about theatre. In chapters ranging from spoken word performances to ballet, from the use of machines and technology to performances that make space for voices occluded by the ancient epics, Performing Epic or Telling Tales seeks to contextualize and explain the 'narrative'/storytelling (re-)turn in recent live performances - a turn that regularly entails engagement with ancient Graeco-Roman epics, which have long provided poets, playwrights, artists, and theatre makers with a storehouse of rich, often perceived as 'raw', material. Refigured and refracted for the modern era, the epics of ancient Greece and Rome are found to be particularly revealing, and particularly 'telling' of the contemporary wider cultural sphere.
Download or read book The Poetic Enlightenment written by Rowan Boyson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this edited collection look at the role of poetry in the development of Enlightenment ideas. As scholarly disciplines began to emerge – anthropology, linguistics, psychology – the ancient art of poetry was invoked to create new ways of defining and expanding this philosophy of human science.
