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With its powerful combination of music and theatre, opera is one of the most complex and yet immediate of all art forms. Once opera was studied only as 'a stepchild of musicology', but in the past two decades opera studies have experienced an explosion of energy with the introduction of new approaches drawn from disciplines such as social anthropology and performance studies to media theory, genre theory, gender studies and reception history. Written by leading scholars in opera studies today, this Companion offers a wide-ranging guide to a rapidly expanding field of study and new ways of thinking about a rich and intriguing art form, placing opera back at the centre of our understanding of Western culture over the past 400 years. This book gives lovers of opera as well as those studying the subject a comprehensive approach to the many facets of opera in the past and today.
The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound provides a detailed and comprehensive overview of screen music and sound studies, addressing the ways in which music and sound interact with forms of narrative media such as television, videogames, and film. The inclusive framework of "screen music and sound" allows readers to explore the intersections and connections between various types of media and music and sound, reflecting the current state of scholarship and the future of the field. A diverse range of international scholars have contributed an impressive set of forty-six chapters that move from foundational knowledge to cutting edge topics that highlight new key areas. The companion i...
In An Eye for Music, John Richardson navigates key areas of current thought - from music theory to film theory to cultural theory - to explore what it means that the experience of music is now cinematic, spatial, and visual as much as it is auditory.
Through historical and contemporary examples, this book critically explores the relevance and expressions of multicultural representation in western European operatic genres in the modern world. It reveals their approaches to reflecting identity, transmitting meaning, and inspiring creation, as well as the ambiguities and contradictions that occur across the time and place(s) of their performance. This collection brings academic researchers in opera studies into conversation with previously unheard voices of performers, critics, and creators to speak to issues of race, ethnicity, and culture in the genre. Together, they deliver a powerful critique of the perpetuation of the values and practi...
Yayoi Uno Everett focuses on four operas that helped shape the careers of the composers Osvaldo Golijov, Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, and Tan Dun, which represent a unique encounter of music and production through what Everett calls "multimodal narrative." Aspects of production design, the mechanics of stagecraft, and their interaction with music and sung texts contribute significantly to the semiotics of operatic storytelling. Everett's study draws on Northrop Frye's theories of myth, Lacanian psychoanalysis via Slavoj Žižek, Linda and Michael Hutcheon's notion of production, and musical semiotics found in Robert Hatten's concept of troping in order to provide original interpretive models for conceptualizing new operatic narratives.
This book contemplates the relationship between opera and anthropology. It rests on the following central arguments: on the one hand, opera is quite a new and “exotic” topic for anthropologists, while, on the other, anthropology is still perceived as an unusual approach to opera. Both initial arguments are indicative of the current situation of the relationship between anthropological discipline and opera research. The book introduces the work of anthropologists and ethnographers whose personal and professional affinity for opera has been explicated in their academic and biographical accounts. Anthropological, ethnological, ethnographic, and semiotic accounts of opera by Claude Lévi-Str...
Extreme Exoticism explores the role of music in shaping American perceptions of the Japanese, the influence of Japanese music on American composers, and the place of Japanese Americans in American musical life over the past 150 years.
Whether referred to as mermaid, usalka, mami wata, or by some other name, and whether considered an imaginary being or merely a person with extraordinary abilities, the siren is the remarkable creature that has inspired music and its representations from ancient Greece to present-day Africa and Latin America. This book, co-edited by a historical musicologist and an ethnomusicologist, brings together leading scholars and some talented newcomers in classics, music, media studies, literature, and cultural studies to consider the siren and her multifaceted relationships to music across human time and geography.
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.”
Introduction - Archiving America: sound technology and musical representation - Opera cut short: from the castrato to the film fragment - Selling jazz short: Hollywood and the fantasy of musical agency - Opers and jazz in the score: toward a new spectatorship - Conclusion.